Voyage Across the Stars (13 page)

By comparing the ancient microfiches with the vessel’s own navigational data, Levine and his crew had found a nearby colony with a high technical rating which was no longer listed in current files. With luck, this one—Stagira—would be unfrequented but would have useful items that even GAC 59 alone could loot.

“I hadn’t,” Slade admitted aloud as he and his men echoed down the broad corridor, “expected the hardware to be in such good shape and
nobody
around.”

“Any sign of farms when we landed?” asked one of the men.

“No sign of nothing,” said Blackledge, who had also been on the bridge. “Place is bare as a whore’s bum.”

“Didn’t seem to be any native life at all,” Slade agreed. “Hydroponics would’ve been simpler than surface farming, no lack of raw materials. That doesn’t explain why they didn’t build at all on the surface . . . but there wasn’t any lack of odd-ball notions when the first colonies cut loose from Earth, either.”

“Here’s a door!” called one of the men who had ranged furthest ahead.

“Then let’s see what’s behind it,” Slade said in a calm voice. As he walked toward the portal and his clustering men, the tanker hitched up his equipment belt. The others carried shoulder weapons of one sort or the other. Slade wore only a holstered pistol—and, on his back, a satchel of plastic explosive. Fiddling with his belt gave him a surreptitious chance to wipe his sweaty palms on his coveralls.

“Shall I blow it in?” demanded one of the outlaws. Each man carried either a block of explosive like Slade or several blasting caps. The caps were touchy and bloody dangerous, but it was the men who carried the—quite inert—blocks of explosive who seemed most interested in shedding their burdens.

“Via, let’s just try the touch plate,” Slade said. When nobody else moved, he tapped the square in the center of the panel himself. There was no blast, no paralyzing shock as they had all managed to psych themselves into expecting. Instead, the door whispered sideways. It gave onto a scene in sybaritic contrast to the bleak corridor outside.

“Bingo,” Slade called on his commo unit. Its signals would be drunk by the walls when he stepped inside, so the tanker wanted to tell those on the ship of the good fortune. “We’ve got our roughage and probably our protein besides. I’ll scout around, see what we can raise, and report in a moment.”

The air that puffed from the verdant interior was humid enough to condense noticeably in the corridor. The vegetation was varied. At least most of it was Earth-standard stock. There were no walls visible save the fifty centimeters between the corridor and the interior. The carefully-tended pathway felt like real sod beneath Slade’s feet as he stepped inside.

“Just for the hell of it,” the tanker said as the last of his men were following him into the artificial environment, “let’s put something solid in the door’s slideway. Pergot, your gun’ll do. Just something to block it if it decides to close itself. Gives us room to set a charge.”

The outlaw obeyed. He was unhappy about disarming himself, but he was unwilling to make an issue of the fact. The shoulder weapon’s heavy iridium barrel should at worst only deform under the stresses that the closing mechanism could exert on it through the massive door.

As the men started to turn, secure in their retreat, the gun sank into the trackway’s gray, nondescript lining. The door began to slide shut as quietly as it had opened.

Pergot lunged back, either to snatch up his disappearing weapon or to get into the corridor again. He accomplished neither. Or, at any rate, most of the outlaw did not reach the corridor. Pergot’s left boot and right leg from mid-thigh lay inside the cavern when the door hissed to rest. Very possibly Pergot’s head and hands were clear on the other side, so that only the half-meter of his torso had disappeared within the tonnes of door.

Something burst out of the undergrowth behind the party. The men were already tense with the horror before them. They spun, several of them screaming. The pig that had appeared now disintegrated in a squeal and cyan glare.

“Put ’em up!” Slade shouted as he bulled forward. The pig was scattered gobbets. Wallace, who had jumped aside at the animal’s appearance, was on the ground also. The garish tunic the outlaw wore was afire, and there were two cratered holes in the small of his back. A companion’s submachine gun had raked him.

Slade smothered the fire with his own broad chest, then ripped the smoldering remnants free. “Poles for a stretcher—Kuntz, Reecee,” he ordered, naming two of the men who wore heavy knives.

The SpraySeal from the tanker’s medical pouch was closing off the wounds, but it could do nothing for the internal damage. Powergun bolts had limited penetration, but abdominal wounds like these would be bordered by cooked flesh as much as a centimeter deep. There was nothing Slade could do about that. He was not even sure the ship’s medicomp was up to the task. The Slammers could have handled it; anybody who got back to a Battalion Aid Station with his brain alive was going to make it.

But right now, Friesland seemed about as close as the ship, with that massive door separating both from the scouting party.

Slade set a cone of Hansine against the base of Wallace’s spine. The wounded man trembled slightly as the drug entered his system. It would disconnect his sensory apparatus until the dose was counteracted. That would not keep ruptured blood vessels from leaking, and it would not keep Wallace’s belly from swelling as his intestines writhed around patches of dead muscle in their walls.

“What happened to Pergot’s gun?” asked Blackledge, now that there was leisure again for recollection. “That molding looked just like zinc sheet, but the gun slipped through it like water.” After a pause, the outlaw added, “You know, the whole wall looks like it’s covered with the same stuff. Howes, poke at it, why don’t you? Maybe we can slip right through.”

“Screw yourself, why don’t you?” Howes snapped. He leveled his 2 cm weapon at the door, however.

“Hold up, dammit,” Slade said as he stepped out of his coveralls. The tanker had worn standard battle-dress for the sake of its pockets and attachments. Most of the party was in looted finery of one sort or another. The tough fabric of the coveralls would make a much better bed for the stretcher.

Howes fired. The air sizzled in a blue-green flash. The door’s sheathing acted as a reflex reflector, splashing the bolt back in the direction from which it had come.

The reversal was imperfect enough that the whole party caught some of the charge. Howes, the gunman, was at the center of the spreading cone, however. Foliage beyond the men hissed. Slade shouted at what felt like a bath of nettles over his bare calves and buttocks.

Howes dropped his gun. The skin of his hand was fiery, and the surface of his eyes had baked in the glare that seared away his brows. When the gunman began to scream, his cracked lips gemmed with blood.

“All right,” Slade said. He immobilized Howes with one hand while his other fumbled the SpraySeal from the kit again. The spray contained a surface analgesic that would take care of Howes’ immediate pain, though the blindness was another matter. “We’re going to move out,” the tanker continued with both volume and authority. “We’re going to find out who’s behind all this. And then we’re going to change it.”

The tanker put the sealant back into the kit. His own buttocks and the similar burns of other pirates could wait for better supplies, though his harness chafed angrily as he moved.

“Marshal and Dobbs, first shift on the stretcher,” Slade said. “Broadfoot, you guide Howes here. Let’s move it, boys, we’ve got some convincing to do.”

As the party moved off down the path, Slade scooped up the gun Howes had dropped.

They found the first building a hundred meters away, in a glade. Because it was windowless and completely unadorned, the leading outlaws drew up abruptly and raised their guns at an apparent fortification.

Stoudemeyer had been born on Telemark. “Hey!” he said in wonder, giving two syllables to the exclamation. He slung his submachine gun and pushed past the others to reach the door.

“Via, yeah,” Stoudemeyer said as his hand caressed the door without touching the latch plate. “Captain, do you know what this is? It’s a true to God bubble house! There’s only five of them on Telemark, and I’d have said there wasn’t another in the galaxy!”

“Well, what’s it do, then?” Blackledge demanded. He gestured toward the man and building alike with a prodding motion of his gun muzzle.

“It does everything,” Stoudemeyer said. He palmed the latch. “It does every curst thing you could imagine.”

The others, even Slade, twitched a hair to the side as the door slid open. It was too reminiscent of the cavern’s outer portal. The man from Telemark strode through without hesitation. “I tell you,” he called over his shoulder, “being caught in here is like a bee drowning in honey. It don’t hurt a bit. . . .” The door closed behind Stoudemeyer, then opened again before the babble of fear could even start. “The latch works fine from this side too,” said Stoudemeyer, “but suit yourselves.”

Blackledge was the first to follow Stoudemeyer. Slade was the last, and he decided not to order someone to stay back with Wallace. Never give orders you know will be ignored . . . and the tanker did not want to miss his own first look into this candy store, either.

The interior walls were a neutral gray when Slade first glimpsed them through the open door. By the time he was inside, however, Stoudemeyer had activated a control orally. The house was running through a series of panoramas, three or four seconds apiece, in which the walls seemed to melt into the far distance. Then the whole scene would dissolve into a radically different one. Slade did not appreciate the level or realism until the third example, a knoll of sere grass beneath a sky of cloud and purple lightning. Hard-spitting raindrops began to lash the men from hidden outlets. Among the curses and shouts of anger, Stoudemeyer’s voice cried, “Cancel climate! Cancel sound!”

The sparkling desert that followed—in a few seconds, for a few seconds—did so without the blast of heat that would otherwise have probably accompanied the blue-tinged sunlight.

“Tell it to find something and hold it, Stoudemeyer,” Slade directed irritably. The tanker could not hear Stoudemeyer’s response over the general rumble of so many men in a small building.

The background segued to a glade much like the outside. Via, it
was
the glade outside; there lay Wallace twitching under stimulus of the breeze that ruffled the grass beside him. It was as if the party had been covered by a glass bubble thick enough to block out all sound.

“What do you sit on?” an outlaw demanded.

Stoudemeyer shrugged. “Ask for a chair,” he said.

“All right, give me a chair,” said the other man. He stumbled forward and the fellow behind him jumped away. The floor between them rose into a sculptured chair mounted on a pedestal that seemed too thin to support itself and a seated man. Neither Slade nor anyone else doubted that the construct
would
hold; but prodding at it with a finger was as much of a trial as anyone would make for the moment.

The Telemark mercenary was basking in his sudden importance. “Swivel chair,” he said, pointing at the floor in front of him. From the point indicated extended a seat with the liquid grace of an amoeba. The seat looked like the one earlier called to life; but when Stoudemeyer sat in this one, he was able to spin it in further display. “Everything,” he repeated, “anything. All you have to do is ask.”

Outlaws were moving apart as far as the four-meter diameter of the floor permitted them. They were experimenting with shapes. Some of the more imaginative were creating subtle forms from their home worlds. They could even mime wood grains and basketry.

“Food?” asked Slade. He could simply have checked for himself. He did not, however, care to push buttons—even verbal ones—at random when there were directions available.

Stoudemeyer waved expansively. “Ask,” he said as if he himself were the provider.

“Bring me Tethian rock-cruncher in a pepper sauce,” the tanker said firmly.

“I’m sorry,” responded a voice. It seemed only millimeters from Slade’s ear. “That is not in my inventory. You may describe the dish by reference to others; or, if you prefer, you may make another selection.”

Stoudemeyer must have heard the house’s response, or at least enough of it to extrapolate the remainder. He hopped out of his chair with the smug expression replaced by one of concern. “Hey, I’m sorry, sir, I forgot. This place is probably as old as the ones back home. I mean—maybe eight hundred standard years. Can you believe it? That old and work like this still? He was a genius, a bloody genius.”

“You mean try Earth food, not Tethys’, because this place was built before the Settlement,” Slade said to clarify what he had just been told. One point at a time.

“Right, or Telemark food,” Stoudemeyer agreed. In test and demonstration, the man from Telemark said, “Bring me hassenpfeffer and a mug of, oh, any lager.”

Slade could hear the voice saying from beside the other mercenary, “Yes sir, your food will be brought in forty—three—seconds.”

“And this isn’t half of it,” Stoudemeyer confided to Slade. All around the room, outlaws were exploring this new capacity of the dwelling. Some of the men were demanding protein rations after a series of failures to come up with any other meal from the hidden menu. “The real thing about bubble houses is the dream-code feature.” He kept his voice very low. “It’s supposed to be as good as, as, you know—the sorm.”

Stoudemeyer turned his head. He looked somewhat embarrassed. “I wouldn’t really know, you know. On Telemark, you’ve got to own a province, practically, to even think of owning a bubble house. I mean, there’s
five
that Kettlemann built before he disappeared. But everybody knows about them.”

“Your dinner, sir,” said the voice that was as cunningly projected as the rain had been some minutes earlier. The floor bulged like asphalt bubbling in the sun. The bulge rose on a stem like those that lifted chair seats. It halted with a hydraulic, not mechanical, smoothness at the height of Stoudemeyer’s mid-chest. The bulge then irised open from the top to form a platter around a poultry-in-gravy dish which Slade presumed was hassenpfeffer. At any rate, the man from Telemark seemed satisfied as he took a thigh bone and began nibbling at the dark meat. “It’s good,” he said. “Try it.”