Voyage Across the Stars (48 page)

The truck slewed to a halt as the driver threw himself on the cab floor.

“Jon, it’s me, Lissea!” Lissea cried. She stood up in her seat.

“Fight, you cowards, or we’ve had it!” Jon Watford screamed as he swung his tribarrel toward the jeep.

“Jon!”

Ned’s burst hit the settlers’ leader four times in the upper chest and throat. Ned’s visor blanked the core of the flashes, leaving only shimmering cyan haloes.

Watford recoiled against the back of the hatch ring. He still held the tribarrel’s grips. Ned raised his point of aim. This time only two of the bolts hit, but even the pistol-caliber rounds were enough to rupture Watford’s cranial vault.

“Cease fire!”
Lissea Doormann ordered.
“All units cease fire!”

A safety device in the truck switched off the fans after ten seconds of unattended operation. Cooling metal clicked and pinged.

Ned leaned over the side of the jeep. He managed to raise his faceshield before he vomited.

“We saw the ship land,” the settler said. His eyes were closed, and he couldn’t have been really conscious with the amount of pain-blockers in him as Tadziki worked on the stump of his right leg. “We thought, ‘They took care of the Spiders but we’ll show we can handle smugglers the same way ourselves.’ We were—we wanted to show the women what
we
could do.”

“There, that’s as much as I can do,” Tadziki said. He stood up. “Keep him warm, don’t let him go into shock, that’s as much as anybody can do now.”

Two colonists edged past the adjutant and put the wounded man on a stretcher. They were careful but not very adept at their task.

The surviving 5-tonne—mortar shells had left the other a burned-out wreck—was full of corpses. The wounded were moved to smaller vehicles and taken back to Quantock. The settlement’s doctor was one of the fatalities, but medical personnel were flying in from other colonies.

“You know whose fault it is?” Deke Warson shouted. He pointed to a colonist. “It’s you people’s fault! What did you expect when you started shooting at us?”

The colonist bunched his fists and started for Warson. Toll grabbed his brother. Ned caught the settler and twisted both wrists back behind the fellow’s back.

“He doesn’t know what he’s saying,” Ned said. “He’s as spooked as you are.”

“Buddy,” Toll Warson said, “there’s no such thing as friendly fire.” The big merc spoke loudly, but he wasn’t looking at anyone in particular. “I’m sorry as hell, but that’s the way it is.”

Mellie Watford stood beside the five-tonne’s open tailgate. She wore a waterproof cape over a lacy nightdress, and she had house slippers on.

Lissea tried to put an arm around her. Mellie shook herself violently, as though she’d been drenched in ice water. She began to cry, for the first time since a courier had summoned ambulance vans from Quantock and the women came with them.

“They
shot
at us,” Deke Warson said. His voice was almost a whimper. “What the hell did they expect?”

“Ah, Mistress Watford?” one of the colonists said. “We’re ready to start back now.”

“Tadziki,” Lissea Doormann said crisply. “I want the desalinization gear set up tonight. We’ll lift for Mirandola as soon as we’ve filled our fresh-water tank.”

“What the hell did they expect. . .”

The foliage ranged from azure to maroon, spreading broadly from squat tree-trunks. Ned had been raised on a planet where vegetation was sparse and thin-stemmed, so Mirandola’s forests struck him as strange; but the landscape was very beautiful in its own way.

“I don’t see why the settlers are so shirty about us keeping our distance,” Herne Lordling grumbled. “If we were pirates, it wouldn’t help them a bit to tell us to stay away, would it? Anyway, most little colonies, they’re glad of some company.”

“Go around the left side of this tree,” Tadziki said. “It’s only another fifty meters.”

The adjutant was directing the five personnel who hauled a 10-cm hosepipe to a spring-fed stream to replenish the water tank. Four more men paralleled the fatigue party at some distance in the woods: pickets, in case Mirandola turned out to have dangers the pilotry data had ignored.

The hose was flexible, but it had to be stiff-walled so as not to collapse under the suction of the
Swift’
s
pump. Even though the direction was basically downhill and the hose didn’t bind on the surface of fallen leaves, the team doing the work mostly staggered forward with their heads down.

“I didn’t even know there was a permanent settlement on Mirandola,” said Louis Boxall. “It was just a stopover point from anything I’d heard, though . . .”

He looked around

“. . . it seems a pleasant enough place.”

“There’s nothing on file about them,” Tadziki said. “Judging from orbital imaging, there’s only forty-odd houses and some fields that don’t look very extensive.”

“Maybe they got spooked when they heard about Ajax Four,” Deke Warson said.

“That’s enough of that!” Lissea snapped. “Why they don’t want company is their own business. We could go all the way to Pancahte on stored rations, and we can get our own water easily.”

Carrying the hose required strength and weight. Lissea, though fit, couldn’t compare to any of her subordinates in either aspect. She was present now because the morning the
Swift
lifted from Ajax Four the second time, she had insisted on being added to the duty roster.

She ignored Tadziki and Lordling when they told her— correctly—that her business should be with matters more important than guard-mount and fatigues. Military structures don’t function as democracies, and pretending otherwise is counterproductive.

Lissea turned her head to the side and added sharply, “It’s just as well that we don’t have to waste time socializing, anyway.”

If the captain chose to feel responsible for a tragedy that was none of her doing, Ned thought, then it was just as well that her self-punishment be limited to a few blisters. People had a right to manage their own souls, however foolish the means chosen might appear to other people.

“Here we go,” said Tadziki. “Now, don’t let’s break our necks in the last three steps.”

The loam gave way to rocks, polished and slick with moss. Ned, at the end of the line, prepared to brace himself in case anyone ahead of him slipped.

“Captain,”
the commo helmets reported in Bonilla’s voice, “
the colonists say they changed their mind. They want a meeting with you. The lady calling, she sounds scared to death. Just you come and one other, she says. Over.”

“Well, they can curst well wait till we get this intake set!”
Lissea snarled. Her boot-heels were bedded firmly in the wet ground.
“Out!”

Tadziki scrambled down the bank and checked the position of the filter head. He glanced back up the pipe. His expression might have been innocent, but Lissea took it as a smirk.

“Don’t you patronize me, Tadziki!” she said. “I knew you were right to begin with. Okay?”

“Slade,” the adjutant called. “Set a clamp to the tree beside you, will you? That ought to keep the line from lashing when we fire up the pump.”

Ned flipped a coil of cargo tape around a tree bole fifty centimeters thick. He wrapped the coil around the pipe and itself, then cut the section while Deke held the ends in place. Ned touched the piece with the electrodes in back of the tape dispenser. The calibrated current induced changes in the tape’s polymer chains, bonding them to one another at the molecular level. Overall length shrank by ten percent, snugging the line firmly to the tree. Waste products driven off in the process had a faint fruity odor.

Warson stepped away, brushing together his hands in satisfaction. “Let’s go home, right?” he said.

Lordling tried to help Lissea up the slope. She was closer to the top than he was. She allowed the contact, but her expression made the pointlessness of it clear.

“Tadziki,” she said in a clear voice, “take me off the rota from here on out.”

“Yes, sir,” the adjutant said.

Lissea looked around at the men with her. “Boys,” she said, “you’re going to have to do the heavy stuff without me. I’ve got to handle deeply important discussions. With dick-heads who can’t make up their minds whether they want to see us or not!”

“There may be some risk involved in meeting these people, Lissea,” said Herne Lordling. “I think I’d better handle it.”

“I’ll handle it, Herne,” Lissea said in a tired voice. “I trust my diplomacy farther than I do yours.”

Creatures flew and jumped about the high tree-limbs, rattling the foliage. One of them, hidden but apparently able to see, chittered down at Ned like a high-speed relay. It sounded quizzical and not unfriendly.

“They may figure to take you hostage, Lissea,” Lordling said.

“Deke,” Lissea said, “if I’m taken hostage by these people, I want you to get me out dead or alive. If I’m dead, I want you to kill every one of them. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Lissea looked at Lordling. Ned, watching out of the corners of his eyes, was glad the expression wasn’t directed at him. “I guess that problem’s taken care of, Herne,” she said. “I trust you’ll be able to carry out the duties that Deke assigns you.”

“Lissea. . .” Lordling said. He sounded as if he were being strangled.

The
Swift
had crushed the clearing in which it landed to double the original size. The boarding ramp was clear, and off-duty crewmen were stringing hammocks from trees. If the weather held, they’d be able to sleep outside the vessel’s metal walls tonight.

“Do you want a driver, Lissea?” Ned said with his eyes straight ahead of him. They hadn’t spoken, she and he, since the last night on Ajax Four.

“Yes, I want you to drive me, Slade,” Lissea said coolly. “I need a driver I can trust.”

“I’ll put on clean utilities, then,” Ned said, in a similarly neutral voice. “We’ll want to impress the locals.”

Also, he’d clip a third magazine pouch onto his equipment belt. Just in case.

Ned’s first impression of the community was its neatness. The houses arranged along the central street were built of native products, generally wood. Most had porches and many had floral plantings, sometimes within little fenced enclosures. The street had a surface of crushed stone stabilized with yel lowish gum that Ned assumed was of vegetable rather than of mineral origin.

Not a soul was visible. A caged bird sang within a house whose windows were open. There were slatted blinds but no screens, though Ned had already killed a biting gnat. Mirandola had been a stopover point for starships for so long that it was inevitable some human parasites would have found a home.

“That must be the community building,” Lissea said, pointing to the single-story structure forming the bar across the far end of the street. Artificial light gleamed through the open windows.

“Let’s hope they all walked,” Ned said as he pulled up in front of the building. He’d seen only a few parked vehicles, although there was a charging post beside every house. He didn’t know where the community’s generator was; the distribution lines were underground. A single fusion bottle the size of a tank’s power supply would be ample for the residents’ probable needs.

The wooden double doors opened as Ned shut down the jeep. A middle-aged woman called, “Please come in, gentlemen. We’re waiting for you.”

“I’ve been called worse,” Lissea muttered. She sounded detached, a sign Ned knew by now to read as nervousness. She carried her usual 2-cm weapon. She’d slung it muzzle-down, perhaps to appear less threatening.

The disquieting thing about the town was that it would have been normal on a civilized planet—and this was a frontier.

“My goodness,” said the woman as Lissea walked into the building a step ahead of her escort. “You’re a woman!”

“Do you have a problem with that?” Lissea snapped. “You wanted the commander and I’m the commander, Captain Lissea Doormann.”

She stared around the gathering. “You’re all women!”

Fluorescents in wall sconces added to the daylight in the big single room. The fixtures had paper shades which gave the effect of cressets. There were about a hundred people present, sitting on wooden benches. The furniture could be folded and added to the pile of similar benches against the back wall. The ages present ranged from early teens to quite old, but there were no young children.

And no men, as Lissea said.

“Yes,” said the woman who’d greeted them at the door. “Ah, I’m Arlette Wiklander, and we’ve agreed that I’ll conduct this meeting. That’s what we’d like to discuss with you. Ah, will you come sit down?”

Arlette gestured the outsiders toward a pair of chairs set to face the benches. She touched Lissea’s sleeve. Lissea twitched the cloth away.

“Let me understand this,” Lissea said. There was no sign of an amplifier in the room, so she spoke in a deliberately loud, cold voice. “You’re telling me that your community has no males in it?”

“No, no!” said a younger, hard-looking woman in the front row. “We just didn’t think they ought to be around for this.
They
didn’t think they ought to be around.”

“Talia, let
me
handle the discussion,” Arlette said. To Lissea she added, “Please won’t you sit down. This is extremely difficult for us. Please, Captain, ah, Doormann.”

Lissea sat down carefully. The iridium muzzle of her weapon clunked against the chairseat. Ned took the other chair, his face as blank as he could make it. Arlette returned to an empty space on the front bench, between Talia and a younger blonde woman.

“You see, the case is,” Arlette said, “that Liberty has a problem.”

“We named the colony Liberty,” Talia added.

“We’ve been here five standard years almost,” said a girl in the second row, probably the youngest person present.

“
Please!”
Wiklander said. The room hushed.

“We came here from Stadtler’s Reach,” Arlette continued. “There had been political difficulties—”

“It was a coup, pure and simple!” Talia said. Her left hand gripped Arlette’s right as she spoke. “The legal government was forced out by thugs on the basis of a referendum they trumped up!”