Voyage Across the Stars (68 page)

Her voice sounded thin against the background rumble of Hammerhead Lake. Ned wished he had a gun, even if it was no more than the pistol he’d lost while deactivating the tanks.

Feeding the capsule through the doorway was a two-man job. Deke took the front of the load; Coyne, who was bigger than he was strong but was strong nonetheless, took the back.

Lissea was talking to Tadziki and Carron. The men bent with their heads cocked to hear her over the voice of Pancahte.

“Come on,” Ned muttered to Harlow and Raff. “We can help out front when they get it clear.”

The other men in the courtyard couldn’t get through the doorway while the capsule blocked it. Dewey looked up and called to the trio on the roof, “There’s nothing but dust inside. What do you suppose this place is? It’s
old.”

Ned nodded. All they could prove was that the bunker, the tanks, and these very different buildings predated the settlement of Pancahte five hundred years before. His instinct told him that they were at least an order of magnitude more ancient yet; which of course was impossible, if the Old Race was really human.

If humans had evolved on Earth.

“Let’s go,” he repeated to his companions. He crossed the roof in quick strides. The land shuddered in an undertone. The vibration wasn’t immediately dangerous, but it seemed even more menacing that the fierce jolts of moments before.

“Toll, we’re coming,” he called and dropped down beside Warson.

Toll grinned sidelong at him. “Our friends there are getting nervous,” he said with a nod toward the guards in powered armor. Ground shocks had kinked the parade-ground line. Even Ayven stood skewed a little from his original stance.

“They’re not the only ones,” Ned said.

Deke backed through the doorway, cursing the load and the building’s architect. He kept his end of the capsule centered perfectly in the circular opening. Ned stepped in beside him. There were no handholds on the top end of the ovoid, so it was a matter of balancing the weight on spread hands. A patina roughened the capsule’s metal surface enough for a decent grip.

Raff and Harlow took opposite sides in the middle. More men spilled through the doorway behind Coyne, but there was no need for them now.

Toll Warson walked to the bearers’ right front like a guide dog. He waved with his left hand to Ayven Del Vore. “Give us a hand, then,” he warned. “Or get out of the way.”

“What is it?”
Ayven said. His voice was harsh and metallic through the suit’s amplifier, but even so it sounded weak beside the crust’s groans.

“Show him what it is!” Carron said, stepping between the capsule and the line of guards. “Set it down for a moment so that my brother can see exactly what he’s trying to steal.”

“Yes, do that,” Lissea said.

“
I
represent the government of Pancahte!”
Ayven rasped. “
I
have a right to know what strangers are trying to take from our world!”

The mercenaries lowered carefully. The ovoid wasn’t intended to rest on its side. Ned stuck the reinforced toe of one of his boots out to cushion the capsule from ground shocks. The adjutant muttered an order to Coyne, who did the same on the reciprocal point.

“Blood and martyrs!” Josie Paetz said. Hot water slopped over the shoreline and swept across the rock.

When the wave withdrew, it left a slime of mineral salts. The water lapped one of the Pancahtan guards to the ankles of his armored boots. He backed farther away, staring at the lake’s roiling surface.

Carron worked the capsule’s latch again and drew the lid open. Ayven started back, throwing a hand up reflexively to shield his armored face.

“It’s a coffin, brother dear!” Carron cried. “Do you begrudge Captain Doormann the corpse of her great-granduncle? Do you?”

The two-place aircar which Ayven had ridden jiggled on the ground. The driver looked nervously out of his cab. The similar vehicle whose soldier passenger was still astride the saddle now hovered twenty centimeters above the rock.

Ayven spun on his heel. His armored foot struck sparks from the rock. “
Go on back to Astragal,”
his amplified voice commanded. “
The body you can have, but the capsule my father will decide on.”

The men lifted. Lissea stepped close to Ned to swing the lid down with her extended arm. The Pancahtan guards stepped dashingly out of the way. Had they never seen a dead man before?

Though the remains of Lendell Doormann had an eerie look to them. It wasn’t that the wizened corpse seemed alive: the rings of blue-gray fungus on the sallow skin belied that notion. Rather, it seemed that the body had been dead and mummifying in the sealed capsule for the entire time since Doormann vanished from Telaria—despite the fact that he had carried on intercourse with the Pancahtans for another fifty years yet.

A double wave broke over the margins of Hammerhead Lake. The pulses washed across the peninsula from three directions. “Bloody
fucking
hell,” Deke muttered, stepping through water as high as his boot tops with the same mechanical precision that he had maintained when the surface was dry.

Yazov was already in the open cab of the nearer 1-tonne, though it wasn’t the vehicle he’d driven to the site. The hovercraft’s flexible skirts dampened the quick choppy motions of the ground into longer-period motions. The truck surged and fell slowly. By contrast, the two big aircars of the guards hopped and chattered despite the shock absorbers in their landing struts.

The mercenaries handed the capsule to their fellows waiting on the bed of the 1-tonne. “Tilt it back on its base,” Lissea ordered.

“And two of you hold it there,” Tadziki added as he helped lift the ovoid straight himself. “Paetz and Ingried.”

Ned’s helmet hissed, static leaking from a nearby transmission. Ayven had given an order to his men, who stamped toward the six-place aircar. One of the guards slipped on yellow-white froth that had been left when the waves receded. He hit the rock like a load of old iron.

A shock knocked down almost all of the people standing on the peninsula, Ned among them. The open door of the pentagonal building flapped with the violence of the quake. Hinges which had survived centuries and perhaps millennia snapped off. The panel clanged down on edge and hopped around an inward-leaning circle until it fell flat.

Hammerhead Lake belched again. Because of the steam, Ned thought another wave was oozing over the shore.

Yazov ran up his fans. Air spewed from beneath the truck’s skirts. Ned stepped back, peering toward the lake.

“Get going!” Lissea ordered. Her shout was barely audible. Carron was at her side, looking concerned but not frightened.

Yazov pulled the 1-tonne in a tight turn. Mercenaries on the truck bed braced themselves against the capsule to steady it.

It wasn’t a wave. It wasn’t a geyser either, though steam and water roaring a hundred meters high made it look as though it might be.

Ned ran toward the parked jeep. He keyed the general push on his helmet radio and shouted, “Don’t anybody shoot! This is Slade! Don’t anybody shoot or we’re all dead!”

The thing rising from the lake was faceted and huge, towering a hundred meters above the shoreline before anyone could be sure it was a solid presence. Its bulk walled the three sides of the peninsula into what had been Hammerhead Lake. The lake was the pit which had held the thing, and the thing filled that kilometers-long cavity as a foot does its sock.

The thing was a starship, a pair of dodecahedral masses joined at the center by a pentagonal bar. Though three hundred meters long and nearly as thick from base to peak, the bar looked tiny compared to the twelve-faceted balls it joined together. Lightning flashed from one lobe to the other. The enveloping steam flickered like a fluorescent tube warming up.

“
Don’t anybody shoot! Don’t shoot!”

Beside Ned, the guard riding the two-place aircar twitched forward the fat-bored powergun slung across his back. He aimed upward at a forty-five-degree angle and fired. The concussion knocked Ned down again.

Recoil from the big weapon made the struts of the hovering aircar tap down. It slid back toward the larger unit with six guards aboard.

A spark snapped from one of the starship’s triple angles. The shooter’s head and helmet vanished in liquid fire. The guard toppled backwards out of his saddle. The large aircar behind him exploded, punched through by a five-sided beam that expanded during its passage.

The vehicle doubled in on itself. Men in powered armor tumbled to either side. Four of them were uninjured, but the two on the center seats had lost everything between waist and knees. Rock beyond the collapsing aircar gouted up as lava, twenty meters high, spraying as far as the civilians at the base of the peninsula.

The driver grounded his vehicle, jumped from his cab, and collided with Ned. The Pancahtan ran blindly toward Hammerhead Lake, and the starship still rising from it.

Ned grabbed the handhold on his side of the small aircar’s cab. There was a folding step, but he couldn’t flip it down with his boot toe and he didn’t dare risk taking his hands off the grip while the driverless vehicle slid sideways.

Something whanged off the opposite side of the cab, a fan-flung pebble or a bullet loosed wildly by a man trying to fight the terrors in his head. The aircar pivoted in a half circle as Ned pushed it in his desperate attempts to board. He finally got his leg over the frame connecting the cab to the rear saddle, then dragged himself through the cab’s side door.

The starship continued to rise. The upper angles of the lobes were lost in haze and lightning half a kilometer high, but the lower surfaces were still within the margin of the pit. Twice sparks licked away swatches of rocky landscape. The discharges might have been retribution on human gunmen, though there was no evidence left in the bubbling lava.

Ned had never driven a Pancahtan aircar before, but there were only so many ways to arrange the controls of a vehicle meant for general use. He checked for the throttle and found it as an up-and-down motion of the control column. He lifted, spun, and hauled back on the wheel. The car rose to ten meters in a climbing turn, accelerating above the ground traffic as Ned drove toward the deactivated tanks.

The Old Race hadn’t left the tanks to keep later humans away from Hammerhead Lake. The tanks had held something else down in that pit. It was up to Ned to undo his mistake of an hour before.

If it was possible to undo the mistake now.

Pancahtan hovercraft tore across the ground like windblown scud. They dragged humps and tangles through the vegetation to mark their passage.

Ned had lost his commo helmet when he’d struggled aboard the aircar. He didn’t know what was happening to the rest of the
Swift’
s
complement, didn’t know if any of the others were alive, and that couldn’t matter now.

He didn’t know if Lissea was alive.

The tanks were where he and Lissea had deactivated them a hundred meters apart, skewed and lonely on the purple-smeared landscape. Ned brought the aircar down hard and too fast. He was ham-fisted in reaction to the second adrenaline rush in an hour. The skids banged to the stops of their oleo suspension, then bounced him up and sideways.

Ned didn’t have the right reflexes for this particular vehicle. He tilted the column against the direction of bounce, but he must have managed to lift the throttle also. Increased power to the fans flipped the vehicle to the ground on its back. Momentum then rolled it upright again.

The cab was dished in, wedging the driver’s door. Ned put his boot-heel to the latch, smashing the panel outward as violently as if a shell had hit it. He was all right. He’d clamped his legs beneath the seat frame to keep from rattling around the cab like the pea in a whistle. He’d feel it in his calf muscles in twelve hours or so, but he was fine for now.

And now might be all there would ever be for Edward Slade.

He ran toward the tank. The hatch was open as he’d left it. The massive vehicle quivered in response to high-frequency shocks pulsing through Pancahte’s crust.

The alien starship had risen completely above ground. The lower surfaces appeared to rest in a pillow of steam bloodied by the light of the primary. Beams sprang from a high point on either bell. Their tracks looked as if matter had been pressed flat in their path and twisted.

Ned grabbed the edges of the tank’s hatch to support himself. Previous blows by the starship had been quick, snapping sparks. These beams differed in type and intensity. They augered south, beyond the visible horizon. The beams had no identifiable color, but they throbbed dazzlingly bright on a world where ruddy light muted all other brightness.

The horizon swelled into a bubble glowing with the colors of a fire opal, as furious as the heart of a star. The Old Race bunker. The starship was attacking the Old Race bunker.

Ned squirmed feet-first into the Old Race tank. The bubble at the point of the intersecting beams burst skyward like a lanced boil, spewing plasma and vaporized rock into Pancahte’s stratosphere. The whole sky shimmered, white at the core of the jet and a rainbow of diffracted hues shimmering outward from that center.

Ned gripped the dashboard. The controls shaped themselves to his palms; the visual panorama sprang into razor-sharp life. The hatch thudded closed behind his head an instant before the shock of the bunker’s destruction reached him through the rocks of the crust.

The landscape hunched upward in spreading compression waves, then collapsed in the rarefactions that followed. The Old Race tank had lifted on its propulsion system when the controls came live. Even so it pitched like a great turtle com ing ashore. The atmospheric shock seconds later was mild by comparison, though it must have been equivalent to that of a nuclear explosion at a comparable distance.

Despite Pancahtan construction methods, there couldn’t have been a building undamaged in Astragal. As for the
Swift—

The
Swift
would have to wait. Ned focused his targeting circle on the center of one of the alien starship’s huge lobes.