Voyage Across the Stars (69 page)

He pressed his right thumb down. The springiness of the tank’s controls shifted to something dead and dry, like old concrete. The panoramic screen didn’t blank, but the real-time visuals switched to icons: the starship was a red Crosshatch, while the Pancahtan landscape became a sweep of tan polygons over which skittered blue blobs in place of the hovercraft fleeing from the peninsula.

The white targeting circle had vanished from the new display. The dull lightbar across the front of the fighting compartment shifted through bright red to orange.

The display returned to normal visuals. The tank gave a great lurch upward. The controls were live again, but the beam of the tank’s weapon ripped a hole almost vertically into the sky, above the starship even though the vast construct continued to rise.

The rear hull of the tank had sunk turret-deep in lava so hot the rock curled in a rolling boil. When the propulsion system came on again, the tank sprayed upward to hover above the dense liquid as if it were still solid rock.

The starship lashed out again with the paired beams that had destroyed the Old Race bunker. The other tank was at the beams’ coruscant point of intersection. The vehicle tilted, sinking into the molten rock as Ned’s own tank had done a moment before.

The other tank’s gun had sheared a collop out of one of the starship’s lobes. Ned lowered his targeting circle to the upper edge of the pentagonal tube joining the bells. He cut downward.

The bar across the front of the tank bathed him in lambent yellow light verging toward green. The starship rotated around the vertical center of the tube. Ned’s beam pared metal away from the alien construct like whiskers rising from the workpiece on a lathe.

The controls went dead; the display returned to icons. The second Old Race tank became a white star that dominated the dull landscape around it.

The color of Ned’s lightbar rose from bright green to blue. His hands had a leprous cast. He thought of the fungus on Lendell Doormann’s face. He licked his lips, but his tongue was dry as well.

The visuals returned, flaring. The pool of lava encircling Ned’s tank was white and meters deep, but his massive vehicle broached like a huge sea beast. The magma was unable to harm the tank so long as the vehicle’s defensive systems had power, but if the rock hardened it would entomb Ned until the stars grew cold.

The other tank fired also, its beam a chain of hammered light. The starship’s lobes had separated and were drifting downward in reciprocal arcs.

Ned focused his targeting circle on the lower edge of a bell. He held his gun steady as gravity dragged the ship fragment through his beam. Fiery streamers sparkled from the point of contact, twisting like octopus arms. They gouged away more of the shipstructure wherever they curled back against it.

The lightbar was vivid indigo, except where patches were beginning to sink into violet and blackness.

The other tank shot at the same lobe as Ned. An irregular wedge peeled away from the great dodecahedron and smashed into the ground an instant before the mass from which it had separated did. Sparks gouted skyward like kilotons of thermite burning. The sparks enveloped the larger portion as it fell into them, warping the hull plates inward.

The tank’s hatch shot open behind Ned.
“Eject at once!”
cried a voice that rasped directly on the human’s lizard brain. “
This vehicle will terminate in ten seconds!”

Ned had concentrated on gunnery, ignoring the movement controls because his tank could neither pursue nor flee from the starship lowering in the heavens. Now, the lava that glowed beyond the hatch was a ram battering the back of Ned’s neck. He spun the live but unmoving knob within his left hand. The tank rotated on its axis, swinging the rear opening away from the pool of bubbling rock. Ned heaved himself clear.

The remaining lobe of the starship hit the ground kilometers away a few seconds after its sectioned fellow had struck. The glare was a sparking echo to the southern aurora where plasma from the bunker’s destruction cooled and dissipated in a broad cloud.

Ned lay on sand and broken rock. The vegetation that had covered the ground was dead. Leaves were seared to a brown tracery of veins which themselves crumbled at the touch of Ned’s hand.

Heat hammered Ned every time his heart beat. He stayed low, but sulphurous gases from the melted rock made his throat burn and his eyes water. He began to crawl toward where the other Old Race tank had been.

The vehicles rotted like sodium in an acid atmosphere. Bits scaled away from armor that had withstood forces that devoured living rock.

The groundshocks had ceased when the alien starship rose fully clear of its pit. The pop and crackle of huge explosions scattered the remaining wreckage, but that was a mild substitute. Occasionally a fireball sailed thousands of meters in the air, burning itself out to fall as ashes.

A breeze blew from the south to feed the flames of the starship’s immolation. The air was fierce and dry, but cooling. Ned rose to his hands and feet, then stood upright.

Lissea was staggering toward him. She’d somehow lost the trousers of her utility uniform, and her right arm bled where the tunic sleeve was torn—

But she was alive, they were both alive, and the distant flames laughed as they cleansed Pancahte of the gigantic star-ship which had laired so long in its crust.

Light flickered from a dozen places on the horizon, as bright in total as the half-risen primary. A vehicle was coming toward Ned and Lissea from the east. Ned couldn’t make out what it was.

“I saw you go off,” Lissea croaked. “I . . . First I thought you were running away.”

“I wasn’t running away,” Ned said. His voice sounded as though he’d had his throat polished with a wire brush.

Lissea nodded. “I know that. How long do you suppose it’s been there, waiting?”

Ned looked toward the broad expanse of the starship’s crash and shrugged. The white sparkle was dimmer than it had been initially, but parts of the mass would burn for days. “I don’t want to think about it,” he said. “If there was one, there could be others—here, maybe anywhere.
We
couldn’t have done anything to stop it.”

“No, I don’t guess we could,” Lissea agreed. She still wore her commo helmet. She adjusted the magnification control on her visor and said, “Carron’s returning to pick us up. He brought me to the tanks when I realized what you were doing, but he had to get clear of the area at once. The car was no protection.”

“Carron
brought you here?” Ned said in amazement.

The aircar was a big, six-place unit like the ones that had carried sections of the Treasurer’s Guard. It was the surviving member of the pair that had accompanied Ayven. Carron brought it down twenty meters from Ned and Lissea. The stubby landing legs skidded on the rock, striking sparks.

“Yes—Carron,” Lissea repeated. She and Ned jogged drunkenly toward the aircar. Carron might have landed closer—but he might have put it down on top of them if he’d tried. The Treasurer’s younger son hadn’t become a better driver in the past hour. After Ned’s own “landing” in the smaller car, he was willing to be charitable.

The sky toward Astragal glowed. Parts of the city were afire.

“Do you want to drive?” Carron shouted as Lissea climbed into the car. He didn’t take his hands off the controls to help her. The fans buzzed angrily because of his unintended inputs. “If you want, you can drive, either of you!”

“Not in the shape we’re in!” Lissea said. “Get us to the
Swift
as fast as you can.”

She threw herself onto the other forward seat. Ned squatted behind and between the pair. Lissea seemed oblivious of the fact that the tail of her utility jacket barely covered her—lacy, black—underwear. An explosion had partly stripped her without taking either her boots or her commo helmet

Carron lifted the big aircar to fifty meters and pointed it south. As soon as it was airborne, the vehicle’s automatic controls took over, leveling and smoothing the flight. Ned hadn’t realized how much the car’s nervous hopping on the ground had irritated him until the motion stopped.

“How did you get this car?” Ned asked. “The guards didn’t just let you have it, did they?”

“I EMPed them,” Carron said. The smooth ride of the vehicle’s own systems had calmed him also. He gestured toward the large attaché case lying in the midsection of the car beside Ned. “A cold electromagnetic pulse to freeze their armor. The powered suits have some shielding, but I scaled my generator to overcome it at short range.”

At the end of the gesture, Carron put his hand on Lissea’s bare thigh. She laid her own hand on top of his.

They passed an overturned civilian hovercraft. The survivors waved furiously. Carron ignored them. They’d probably be as safe where they were as they would in ravaged Astragal.

“I thought Ayven might have his men arrest me,” Carron continued. “For the, you know, the key. I couldn’t shoot my way through them, but a pulse that burned out the circuits of their suits all at once . . . So I carried a generator with me today. And I used it on the guards because I knew we couldn’t get clear of that
thing
in a ground vehicle.”

Carron was talking to Lissea. Ned avoided looking directly at the other man and calling attention to himself.

That Carron was technically capable of preparing such a plan shouldn’t have been a surprise. He clearly wasn’t stupid, and he was well enough versed in electronics to discuss the subject with Lissea, who was expert by galactic standards.

That Carron was ruthless enough to carry out the plan in the fashion described, leaving six men to die because he’d fried their circuitry and turned their powered armor into steel strait-jackets—

Maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise either. He
was
Lon Del Vore’s son and Ayven’s brother.

The car reached the northern outskirts of Astragal. They’d risen to a hundred meters, high enough to get a broad view of the chaos occurring in the city.

A series of parallel cracks arced through the developed area, about a kilometer apart. Extended, they would form circles centered on the site of the Old Race bunker.

When the bunker’s defenses failed, the shock was sudden and from virtually a point source. At its highest amplitude, the wave front created stresses beyond the elastic limits of the rock on which Astragal was built. Everything along those points on the radius of expansion had been shattered to rubble.

People huddled in the streets, looking up at the aircar. Fires burned in many places, ignited by internal damage to the structures or by blazing matter slung from the bunker site. There was neither water nor the coordination necessary to extinguish the fires, so the situation was rapidly getting out of control.

“Lissea,” Ned said, “the spaceport was closer to ground zero than the city was.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?” she snapped.

Carron, struck by the tone though the words weren’t directed at him, snatched his hand away from Lissea’s thigh.

He gestured again toward his case. “I brought an alternate routing out of the Pocket,” he said. “The navigational logs of the original settlers are in the palace library. I’ve gone through them, looking for information on the Old Race. If we try to go back through the Sole Solution, I’m afraid my father will hunt us down.”

“There isn’t any other way into the Pocket,” Lissea said querulously. “That’s
why
it’s the Sole Solution.”

Ned raised himself, gripping the seat backs for support against the one-hundred-fifty-kilometer-per-hour windrush. He squinted toward their destination. The spaceport seemed in relatively good condition, though ships lay like jackstraws rather than in neat, gleaming radii pointing toward the termi nal buildings at the hub.

A large freighter lay on its side. The gray smoke leaking from ruptures in the hull plating was the only sign of movement about the vessel.

“There’s only one way
in,”
Carron corrected. “But there’s another way out. And I’ve brought the navigational data.”

“Blood and martyrs, man!” Ned snarled. “That’s the ship! Don’t fly us off into the desert!”

“Oh!” Carron blurted. He’d set the course when they lifted from the battle site, but he’d forgotten to take the car off automatic pilot. Now he shoved the column forward and banked around the vessel he’d overflown.

Both 1-tonne hovercraft were parked in what had been the
Swift’
s
landing segment. The blast walls had collapsed into twisted ribbons; one of the borrowed trucks lay beneath concrete and strands of wire reinforcement—the remains of the nearer wall.

The vessel herself was undamaged, though she now rested on the ruins of the other wall.

“They lifted off!” Lissea said. “Thank the Lord, somebody had sense enough to get them airborne before the worst of the shockwaves hit.”

“Score one for Herne,” Ned said, though he was by no means sure Lordling was responsible for the decision. Westerbeke and Petit were on anchor watch as well. Ned disliked the ex-colonel so much that he forced himself to give the man his due and more whenever he had to speak of him.

Pancahtans had waved at the aircar or merely stared apathetically as it flew overhead. The men crouching in the rubble about the
Swift
watched the vehicle through the sights of their powerguns. At least some of them had their fingers on the triggers.

Carron was too focused on his landing to notice the overt threat, but Lissea keyed her commo helmet.
“Captain to
Swift
personnel,”
she said.
“Don’t shoot; I’m in the approaching aircar. Over.”

Ned noticed that she didn’t sound angry, just fatigued. He was suddenly tired also. He could melt onto his bunk now, no matter what was happening around him.

Carron landed in two bounces, the second of which put the car’s legs into the jumble of the blast wall and almost overset the vehicle. The
Swift’
s
ramp was raised but not quite closed. It began to lower again as Tadziki and Herne Lordling sprang out of the narrow airlock.

“Are we prepared to lift?” Lissea demanded as those men and other mercenaries ran toward the aircar. She started to get out but stumbled because her legs didn’t want to support her.