Voyage Across the Stars (54 page)

“And then they buried her, as you see,” Gresham said. “Don’t confuse intelligence with technology, mistress and gentlemen.”

“Twenty of them did that?” Toll Warson wondered aloud.

“Probably two thousand,” Gresham said. “Perhaps twenty thousand. Male Buinites concentrate on any ship that lands, like white cells on a source of infection. They appear to be telepathic. They are careless of their individual lives, and they are utterly committed to destroying the intruders.”

He cleared his throat. “There have been cases where a vessel was undermined rather than being overwhelmed by advancing siege ramps,” he added.

“But they
are
intelligent,” Lissea said musingly.

“Clearly,” Gresham agreed.

“That will help,” Lissea said. “I’ll want full data on the Buinites, physical and psychological. I assume that’s available?”

Gresham looked surprised. “Why, yes,” he said. “Everything is available here, in a manner of speaking. But I strongly recommend—”

“Before we worry about Buin,” Tadziki interrupted, “we’ve got to get through the Sole Solution. Now, either it
isn’t
the only way into the Pocket through Transit space;—”

“It is,” Gresham said, nodding vigorously.

“—or we’ve got a real problem,” the adjutant continued. “I don’t see any way in hell that we can get past that Dreadnought in the time it’ll take to recalibrate for the next Transit.”

“We bloody well aren’t going to fight it,” Deke Warson agreed.

“There is, I believe, a way,” Gresham said. He was smiling. “I’ve had a great deal of time to consider the matter.”

His expression didn’t look sane. Ned supposed that nobody exiled to Paixhans’ Node could remain sane.

“Your
Swift
has a lifeboat with stardrive, I presume,” Gresham continued.

“Yes,” Lissea said.

“Then this is how you will proceed . . .”

Ned carried the submachine gun in his hands, not slung. The sky of Burr-Detlingen was white with occasional hints of blue, darkening now toward the east. The sun was just above the horizon, though in these latitudes full darkness would be some while to come.

It was still no time, and certainly no place, for Tadziki to be off wandering alone.

“Tadziki!” Ned called toward the masses of iridium armor, polished to a soft patina by windblown grit. “Hey, Tadziki! Anybody home?”

The
Swift
was a kilometer to the south. Ned had been on the crew that had reopened the well from which the vessel was now replenishing its water supplies. The thousand-meter shaft, a relic of human civilization on Burr-Detlingen, had been partly choked with sand.

Four of the men had gone off in the jeeps, to hunt for meat and for the fun of it. Bonilla, deck watch at the navigation console, told Ned that the adjutant had taken a walk toward the vast boneyard of military equipment near the landing site.

There was enough wind to scour away sound as well as all the paint and insignia from the shot-out vehicles. A yellow haze on the northern horizon indicated a storm sweeping across the badlands. If it changed direction—and who knew what the weather patterns of this place were?—getting back to the
Swift
would be a bigger problem than a dry walk.

“Tad—” Ned called. A figure stepped away from the bulk of a vehicle. Ned presented his weapon, then lifted it when he recognized Tadziki.

“Hey, I was looking for you,” he said. “You, ah . . . Your helmet radio?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother anybody,” the adjutant said. He touched a switch on the side of his helmet. “I set it to ignore nonemergency calls. Even I ought to have a few hours off, eh?”

“Via, I’m sorry,” Ned said. “I was—well, not worried, but there’s supposed to be bands of locals running around. I just thought I’d, you know, make sure everything was okay.”

The tank directly before him had been hit three times by kinetic energy shot. Two of the rounds had failed to penetrate but the projectiles had blasted deep pits in the tank’s frontal slope. The sides of the craters were plated a purple that the sunset darkened.

The third shot had punched through the side of the turret. The interior of the tank burned out with such violence that the thirty-plus-tonne turret had lifted from its ring and resettled at a skew angle before being welded to the hull.

“The locals aren’t any threat,” Tadziki said. “They’ve sunk so far that it’s hard to imagine them as being human. Sometimes passing ships capture them as slaves. Sometimes they’re shot. Just for the fun of it, you see.”

He spoke without emphasis, and his eyes held a blank fatigue that Ned didn’t like to see—see in anybody, and Tadziki was by now a friend.

“That wasn’t in the pilotry data,” Ned said carefully. Tadziki carried a ration pack and a condensing canteen, but he appeared to be unarmed.

Either there was more in Ned’s expression than he thought there was, or the two men were linked to a degree beyond that of physical communication. Tadziki reached into a breast pocket and pulled out a needle stunner.

“I suppose I’m making a statement, Slade,” he said, “but I’m not trying to commit suicide.”

Ned smiled. “Well, you can never tell,” he said lightly.

“Come on and take a look at this,” Tadziki said. He waved at the vast junkyard, armored bulwarks squatting in mounds of fine sand. “It’s an interesting experience.”

They walked past a command car whose fusion bottle had failed. The gush of plasma had not only eviscerated the vehicle, it had sucked the relatively thin armor inward so that the wreck looked like crumpled foil.

“This is my second trip to Burr-Detlingen,” the adjutant said.

Ned looked at him sharply.

“No, no,” Tadziki explained. “Not during the fighting—that was nearly a century ago. A cartel on Thunderhead got the notion of salvaging the equipment here. I was part of the team they sent to assay the possibilities.”

Three armored personnel carriers were lined up nose to tail. Each had taken a powergun bolt through the center of its broadside. All the vehicles’ plane surfaces were bulged convex by internal explosions.

“Salvage this?” Ned said.

“Yeah, well, they hadn’t seen it,” Tadziki explained. “They’d just heard about all the high-quality equipment aban doned here with nobody to claim it. We spent a week on the survey without finding a single piece that was worth more than metal value.”

“Metal value” meant “worth dirt.” Every planetary system had an asteroid belt which sorted metals in pure form and rich alloys, ready for the taking. Only colonies which had lost the ability to travel in space placed a premium on metal.

Tadziki climbed the bow slope of a tank and onto the turret. Ned followed him onto the artificial hillock. The barrel of the main gun had been shot out so badly that there was no way to tell from the cone-shaped remnant what the bore’s original di ameter had been.

“This is where the final battle of the war was fought, did you know?” Tadziki said. He gestured again at the field of gigantic litter

“Really?” said Ned. “I would have thought it was just a salvage yard.”

“They fought with spears and clubs,” Tadziki explained. “One side built rock walls between the carcasses of the vehicles and used them for fortifications.”

He pointed.

Ned could see signs of artifice, now that they were pointed out to him. “The other side attacked them. Nobody won, of course.”

“I think it was a religious war,” Ned said. He looked down. Sand had eroded the join between the hatch cover and the coaming into a deep, thumb-thick gully. He couldn’t see any sign of battle damage to the tank, however. “We studied one of the battles at the Academy. In Intermediate Tactics class, I think.”

“It was excellent equipment!” Tadziki said angrily. He stamped his foot on the turret roof. It was like hitting a boul der: the armor was too thick to bell at the impact. “There isn’t one planet in a thousand today who could build or afford to buy hardware like this.”

“Yeah,” Ned agreed as he surveyed the hectares of sophisticated equipment. “I was wondering about that myself. This isn’t exactly a land flowing with milk and honey.”

The sun was down, though the sky still looked bright. “You know,” he said. “It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to be getting back to the
Swift,
whether or not the locals are a problem.”

“They grew citrus fruit,” Tadziki said. He showed no signs of planning to leave the graveyard. “Lemons in particular—Terran lemons naturalized here. They had a unique flavor. Burr-Detlingen exported fruit all over the galaxy.”

Ned looked around. Except for the vicinity of the
Swift,
nothing in the landscape moved but what the wind blew.

“Any of the groves left in driving distance?” he asked. “If we have to wait here three days before trying the Sole Solution, maybe we could get a jeep.”

“There’s nothing left,” the adjutant said. “They weren’t groves; they were individual trees in walls to keep the wind from stripping them. The walls became pillboxes, and of course the irrigation system was destroyed early on. There’s nothing left that anyone would want to have.”

It was becoming appreciably darker. Well, the charge-coupled devices in their helmet visors could increase ambient light by three orders of magnitude. Lack of depth perception wasn’t a problem in terrain this barren.

“I’d never have come back here if there’d been a choice,” Tadziki said. “There wasn’t a choice: no planet close enough for us to launch the lifeboat into the Sole Solution in a single Transit.”

Everybody had moods. Tadziki was under greater stress than anybody on the expedition except Lissea herself. Maybe more than Lissea, even, because the adjutant had enough experience to know how bad it could get.

Ned reached down and twisted the hatch’s undogging lever. To his surprise, it rotated smoothly. “You couldn’t have checked all these vehicles in a week,” he said as he lifted the hatch open.

The stench hit them like a battering ram. The tank hadn’t been opened in the century since it had been destroyed. The crewman who died lifting his hands toward the inner hatch release had mummified. His teeth were a polished yellow against the coarser saffron skin. The eyes had sunken in, but they were still open.

And the stench . . .

The two men tumbled down the sides of the tank as if a grenade had burst between them. Ned wheezed and gagged. He closed his eyes for a moment, then found that it was better if something other than memory provided his mind with images.

“Why do men go for soldiers?” Tadziki shouted. They were walking back toward the
Swift,
wallowing in sand which had drifted around the skirts of the vehicles. “Do they believe in
that?
Is that what they want?”

It was too dark to see clearly unaided, but Ned didn’t want to shut his visor. Concussion from a large mine could have killed the tank crew, crushing their internal organs without penetrating the hull of their vehicle.

“It’s not that simple,” he said.

“On the contrary, boy,” Tadziki said. “It’s
exactly
that simple.”

After a moment, he reached out and gripped Ned’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Ned reached up and squeezed the adjutant’s hand against him. “No sweat,” he said. He looked back at the armored wasteland, tombstones for a whole planet. “I’m sorry too,” he added.

“Stand by for Transit,” Westerbeke announced.

Lissea was at the backup console, though Ned doubted she’d had much more navigational experience than he’d had. She was nervous, just like the rest of them. If she wanted to be in position to see disaster instantly, then nobody aboard could deny her the right.

“Via,” said Ingried plaintively. “The worst it can be is they tell us we’re bad boys to try to run the Solution, and they make us land on Alliance. Right? Maybe we get fined.”

“The
worst
it can be,” Yazov said in a harsh, no-nonsense voice, “is that they figure out we’re the ones that tried to kill them all, and then they torture us to death. Maybe the same way that we tried to do them.”

“Shut up, both of you,”
Tadziki said, using the vessel’s PA system.

“Transit.”

Ned felt the flip-flop passage from one bubble universe to another with wholly different physical laws, then back again to the first. He deliberately prevented himself from gripping his bunk rails fiercely. Part of his mind
felt
that could help him against a bolt of plasma devouring the entire vessel.

“No sign of the Dreadnought,” Westerbeke said. “
No
sign of the Dreadnought, but there’s our lifeboat.”

“Boys, I think we did it!” Lissea cried.

She adjusted the holographic display at her console, projecting the view at maximum enlargement. The lifeboat the
Swift
had launched from orbit above Burr-Detlingen hung in vacuum; there was nothing material within a light-month of the Sole Solution.

Men cheered and swung out of their bunks—Ned as quickly as any of the others. The
Swift
had the traditional 1-g way on, so there was considerable risk if the vessel made another Transit while the complement was out of its couches. Fifteen minutes was as fast as the AI could recalibrate, though; and anyway, it was worth a bruise or even broken bones to release the tension of the last few hours.

“Here, I’ve got the data dump,” Lissea said. She touched her controls. The starscape shifted to a recording made inside the lifeboat during its unpiloted Transit into the Sole Solution. Initially, that meant the holographic display was a pulsing purple, the closest the equipment could come to reproducing the absolute lightlessness within the little vessel.

“Unidentified ship,”
snapped a transmission-modulated laser rather than a radio, judging from the static-free reception. “
Heave to immediately. This is Twin Worlds Naval Unit One. You will not get another warning. Over.”

The lifeboat’s interior lights went on at full intensity. The six Nodals within were of an unhealthy translucence from days of lightlessness. Their flesh, yellow and pustulant, began to firm up visibly under the illumination.