Voyage Across the Stars (17 page)

The healthy Trek rolled its wheezing fellow belly-down on the shelf. The Trek’s strain at the activity suggested that the autochthones had less short-term strength than even human females of the same size. Despite that, the medic did not help his assistant turn the injured creature. The local man was instead pulling on a pair of disposable gloves. He bent forward as his Trek assistant spread the other autochthone’s buttocks.

Slade knew too little about Trek physiology to guess whether the opening displayed was a cloaca or something more specialized than that. The black skin of its lips was distended. The surrounding fur was matted, though there was no sign of fluids leaking as they did from the creature’s ears and nose.

“Well?” demanded Senior Patriarch Bledsoe.

The medic reached into his kit. Instead of speaking, he gave his superior a curt nod. The medic’s face was a queasy contrast to the metallicly-calm expression of his Trek assistant.

Bledsoe’s tongue touched dry lips. “Captain Levine,” he said, “your crew will be delivered to you as soon as humanly possible. Humanly! You will lift off within five minutes of the last arrival.” The official’s eyes were as merciless as the twin-barreled gun turret aimed at the ship from outside.

“Senior Patriarch,” Slade interrupted, “we’ll clean our own house. You can watch if you like.”

The tanker did not look at Riddle. The navigator stood in near catatonia by the bulkhead. Slade’s words rang about him with deadly earnestness. Slade was going to beat the balding navigator within an inch of his life, because nothing short of that could be expected to satisfy the Windward authorities. “And we expect to pay a stiff penalty over and above the cost of a replacement Trek. But—”

“Are you mad?” Bledsoe demanded as if he and not the tanker were the man who had killed for a business. “Mister Slade, I will have them slag this ship down around me before I will consider placing another Trek into this
cesspool!”

The gloved medic put an injector behind the dying Trek’s ear. The creature convulsed mightily. The medic jumped back to avoid the flailing limbs. He dropped the empty injector on the shelf.

“Sir,” said the tanker. His anger was obvious and as great as that of Bledsoe. “We won’t leave because we
can’t
leave that fast in our present state of crewing. If that means blasting us where we stand, then you might want to see how our powerplant’s been rigged.” That was a lie, but it would be the truth if Slade had half an hour’s grace. “If you’re willing to deal, though, we’ll deal with you on any terms that give us a chance to survive.”

The medic and his assistant were already leaving the cubicle. Riddle stared at the Trek. It ignored him. The other autochthone was dead, though its extremities continued to slap the shelf and walls. The injection had only speeded the process made inevitable when the Trek absorbed human proteins.

The Senior Patriarch swallowed, “All right,” he said, staring fiercely back at the tanker. “I’ll send aboard a navigational unit with a link to the central computer. They’ll set and lock your controls onto the nearest inhabited world, that’s Erlette. And if that isn’t satisfactory, Mister Slade—then yes, we
will
see what you may have done to your powerplant. Good day!”

The Windward official turned and bounced Captain Levine out of his way. Bledsoe did not even seem to notice the contact as he strode back toward the hatch.

“Slade, Slade, Captain,” Levine pleaded, “does he mean that Riddle—”

As if his name were a trigger, Riddle ran down the corridor. “You bastards!” he shouted. “You bastards! You know they’re human!
You know they’re human!”

Levine and the tanker tried simultaneously to jump after the navigator. The instant’s delay they caused each other permitted the balding man to reach the hatch before they could catch him.

Bledsoe had continued to walk toward the vehicle that had brought him to the ramp. The medic and his assistant were already seated and waiting. So were two other Treks. One was the driver.

The other crewed the pillar-mounted tribarrel. The air cushion vehicle was not an ambulance but a gun-truck.

Riddle caught Bledsoe by the sleeve while the local official was still half-way from his vehicle. Bledsoe had ignored the navigator’s previous taunts. Now he turned. Harsh light at an angle threw his face into a sequence of cold ridges and cold valleys.

Slade saw and understood the look in the Senior Patriarch’s eyes. Captain Levine tried to squeeze past to run to his crewman. The tanker’s arm encircled Levine’s waist and immobilized the smaller man by lifting his feet from the deck. This was no time to interfere. It would be like trying to stop lava with a barrier of brushwood.

“You’re human!” Riddle screamed to the Trek at the automatic weapon. “You’ve got to free yourselves;
kill
the people who torture you!
Kill
them!”

The medic broke his stony reserve. He leaped from the truck seat with a cry of rage. Bledsoe turned also. He was trying only to restrain the other Windward human, but Riddle reacted as if the motion were a challenge. Riddle’s fist clubbed the older, heavier man on the side of the neck. Bledsoe stumbled to his knees with a grunt.

The Trek gunner fired a long burst into Riddle’s body. The hot-griddle hiss of the shots was obscured by the shattering disintegration of the navigator’s chest. Then both ceased, discharge and impact. What remained of Riddle slumped to the ground. Its left hand was extended as if in entreaty.

The iridium muzzles of the tribarrel glowed, and there was a glowing track in the ramp’s face where a bolt had struck because the thorax at which it was aimed had vaporized. Ozone and decomposition products from the expended cartridges warred with the animal odors of burned flesh and voided wastes.

Slade released Captain Levine.

The gun’s cyan flickering had frozen the medic in a half crouch from which he slowly relaxed. Senior Patriarch Bledsoe got to his feet with the clumsiness of a reanimated corpse. The right side of his face and uniform were freckled by the navigator’s explosive death. “Five minutes after we deliver your last
man,
Captain Levine,” said Bledsoe.

He swung himself aboard the truck. As the vehicle whistled off toward the Operations Building, the dimly-glowing muzzles of the tribarrel continued to track Slade and Levine in the hatchway.

“He would really have blown up his ship,” thought Elysium. “He would have killed everyone for kilometers around. And they had a right to expel the vessel, the folk of Windward. Their culture was threatened.”

“He saved the ship and saved his fellows,” Elysium replied. There was, there could be, neither heat nor rancor in the exchange. It was more as if two currents met in the sea, swirling and mingling. “He saved lives that would have been lost had he bluffed and been called on it.”

Then, with all the unity that so many minds could muster on any subject; “He does not bluff when he threatens. When he offers slaughter, he means nothing short of it. . . .”

“The Transit to Erlette was about as smooth as any I’d made,” Slade was saying. “It was sure as smooth as anything I’d made in GAC 59. That didn’t keep Captain Levine from being concerned, though. . . .”

“This is just asking for disaster, Captain Slade,” said Levine. “We’ll come out of Transit in an atmosphere! Or we’ll wind up in, we’ll never be able to figure out
where,
as tired as my people are going to be.”

“They tell me,” said Slade calmly, “that everything’s spot-on with no problems. And they seem pretty relaxed, too, even if they have been pulling a rotating double.”

“Oh, that’s fine, surely,” said the spacer. His tones of angry sarcasm would not usually have been directed against Slade. “Windward had a ground unit the size of Friesland’s,
certainly
it can preset us across seventeen Transit seconds. What is there on Erlette? Will we find the Transit crewmen we need there? On a place nobody’s ever heard of?”

“You know,” said the tanker, “I
did
hear of Erlette. While I was with the Slammers. But I’m hanged if I remember why. Must’ve been a briefing, people we were operating with or against or some curst thing.
Hanged
if I remember just what, though.”

A dozen of the bridge displays winked and changed in a sudden, organized fashion that meant nothing to Slade. The crewman with the throat mike and earpiece turned to Levine. “Want I should request landing clearance, Captain?”

“Yes, curse it, of course,” Levine said. He twisted and punched up a line of figures on his own console. “Before something
worse
goes wrong.” The Captain’s lips pursed. “Though you know, that’s not bad. Maybe the old girl’s settling in and the misalignments are cancelling out.”

Slade left the bridge as the spacers shifted into the critical minutiae of landing. He wore a puzzled expression. “Wonder if I saved anything with my souvenirs in the hold?” the tanker mumbled to himself. “Not even sure I’ll be able to find the right box, of course. . . .”

The air still rocked with the echo of the thrusters. The landing site was in the flood plain of a creek. The water’s encroachment could presumably be controlled by the dam at the valley’s head, but there was no need of that now. The shallow water sprayed to either side of the service vehicle crossing to reach the starship.

The outlaws were restive. Their partying on Windward had been recent enough that there was not the need to let off steam that a longer Transit would have bred. Further, the party on Windward had ended sharply—brutally, for those who had the bad judgment to try to resist the local authorities. The men who could not be chivvied back were carried aboard the ship. Seven of them were dead. Now the survivors looked over the latest landfall in sullen frustration. The disaster that swallowed their fellows on Mandalay had left GAC 59 too weak to protest the treatment its complement earned.

Slade and Levine waited at the forward hatch. Bourgiby and Rooks, the two surviving members of the Ship’s Meeting, were with them. The port’s visible defenses were of the bare-bones variety to be met with on rural worlds: two powerguns on opposite sides of the valley. They were probably 15 cm, probably old; certainly able to open the ship like a ration packet if they were functional at all. Erlette would have been a good target for the original fleet to raid—if there were anything here to loot. The planet appeared to have nothing to recommend it to GAC 59 alone, except that the inhabitants did not seem to intend to slag the vessel.

Just yet, at least.

The service vehicle was a small bus. It pulled up at the ramp. Partly-uniformed personnel began jumping out of the cab and rear door. A few of them wore coveralls, but most made do with a flash-breasted jacket over nondescript civilian clothes. “Well, Ibe hanged,” said Rooks.

There was no need for him to amplify his statement. A female driver/co-driver team was normal enough. That some of the port officials greeting the new arrivals were female was no cause for surprise either. However, there were about a dozen people in the service vehicle, and every one of them was a woman.

The trio which strode briskly toward the ship’s command group was led by a lithe brunette. She was as leggy as Slade, though a decimeter shorter in the torso. “Captain Levine?” she said to the tanker as she approached.

Slade stepped back, thumbing toward Levine. The woman’s extended hand shifted smoothly toward the spacer, though her eyes retained a glint of awareness of the bigger man. “Captain Levine,” she repeated as they shook hands. “I’m Delores Rodrigues. I’m Mayor here on Erlette. This is Deputy Brandt and Deputy Morales. I can’t tell you how thankful we are. And I assure you, there’s been no recurrence of the disease in fifteen years. It’s perfectly safe.”

“What?”
said Rooks angrily.

Levine’s smile took a sickly cant. Instinct wiped on his trousers the hand that had just touched the woman.

“Why yes,” said Rodrigues, looking across the eyes of the startled men. Slade was trying to place the comment with what he had heard of Erlette, but that heading was still all blank. “The officials on Windward gave us to believe that you were coming as a sort of, well, relief mission. Didn’t they tell you?”

“Blood and martyrs!” Rooks snarled.
“Warn
us, you mean, those bastards! What do you mean, disease?” The outlaw had backed a step up the ramp. Bourgiby, his fellow, was silent but as clearly concerned.

“Ah, Mayor Rodrigues,” said Slade, “I’m not sure how much garbling there might have been in your message from Windward.” Message capsules were radio transmitters slung into on-stage Transit by a ground unit. They had considerable margin for error. “But this is simply a freighter with a cargo of landing thrusters and a need for some specialized crew . . . that we hope you could help us with.”

“Well, yes, but . . .” the Mayor said. She turned her head. The main hatches had been opened also, against orders but inevitably. Outlaws and probably some of the ship’s crew were beginning to exit warily. Though their total number was not yet obvious, it was already clear that they were greatly more numerous than the complement of an ordinary freighter. “They said you had over two hundred men aboard. Males. And surely you have, don’t you?” She waved toward the groups spreading from the cargo hatches.

“Well, yes, but we’re not specialists,” the tanker said. Slade had concealed his surprise when the others froze at mention of disease. Via, he’d been in hellholes in service. Though the Slammers’ excellent Med Section was no longer behind him, the big veteran’s subconscious could not really believe in danger from microbes. Unreasoning confidence armored him against the unproductive fear that wracked the others. “We’re not, ah, medical specialists I mean,” he added.

Deputy Morales was a short, plump woman. Now she laughed briefly. “Via, mister,” she said, “we don’t
need
doctors. Like Delores said, there hasn’t been a sign of the disease since it killed just about all the men on Erlette fifteen years ago. What we need is a little more variety for our sperm bank.”