PAIXHANS’ NODE
Pilotry data indicated the airlock/decontamination chamber of the Paixhans’ Node Station could accommodate two suited humans at a time. There was nothing about the landscape to attract strollers, so the Swift’s complement left the vessel in pairs at the three-minute intervals the entry process required. Ned accompanied Louis Boxall near the end of the slow parade.
“I think,” Boxall said, “that my ancestors must have had Paixhans’ Node in mind when they wrote about Hell. Sang about Hell.”
Ned looked around him. The atmosphere was breathable, as close to Earth Normal as, for example, that of Tethys. The communications station which the Bonding Authority maintained here filtered and heated the air to one hundred fifty degrees Celsius to kill possible spores, but there was no need to supplement the atmosphere to keep the station personnel alive.
The station person, actually.
Apart from that, however, Paixhans’ Node was dank, wretched, and purulent with life—all of which was fungoid. Water condensed from the air, dripping over every surface. Sheets and shelves and hummocks of fungus grew, rotted to slime, and were then devoured by their kin.
The highest life-forms, the Nodals, were human-sized and ambulatory. They had a certain curving grace, like that of a fuselage area-ruled for supersonic operation. The Nodals crawled a millimeter at a time as though they were osmosing across the surface of the rocks. The contact patch served also for ingestion, absorbing all the stationary fungus in the Nodals’ path.
The Nodals were the closest thing to beauty on a world with a saturated atmosphere and a sky that glowed white at all times from the light of billions of stars. They were also the only real danger here, not for themselves but because of the spores which ejected from the core of a ripe Nodal.
“Hell’s supposed to be hot and fiery,” Ned said. He picked his way carefully across the slippery rocks. The Swift had put down half a klick from the station because the ground closer to it was too broken to be a safe landing site. It didn’t make a great footpath, either.
“Not on the Karelian Peninsula,” Louis said. He gestured. “This would do fine.”
They used their external helmet speakers to talk. Normally when personnel wore protective suits, they spoke through radio intercoms. On Paixhans’ Node, electrooptical radiation from everywhere in the Milky Way galaxy converged at the apparent distance of forty-one light-minutes. Ordinary com munications gear was swamped to uselessness; though for properly filtered apparatus, the unique conditions were of enormous value.
The Bonding Authority was the lubricant that made the interstellar trade in mercenary companies work. The Authority guaranteed the table of organization and equipment of mercenary units to the parties who wished to hire them, and guaranteed to the mercenaries that they would be paid per contract.
For the Bonding Authority to function efficiently, it needed something as close as possible to real-time communications across the galaxy. The communications station on Paixhans’ Node acted as a transceiver serving the Authority and, at considerable fees, the needs of other users.
“Well,” said Ned, “I won’t tell you your ancestors were wrong.”
Their path would take them within arm’s length of a Nodal. It swayed gently to a rhythm beyond human comprehension. The creature’s upper portions swelled slightly from a pinched waist. Bubble-like vacuoles as well as chips of solid color were visible beneath the translucent skin. The axial core had a pale yellow tinge.
“Via!” Boxall swore. “Don’t touch it or you might set it off.”
“They’ve got to be as bright as tractor enamel before they’re really ready to burst,” Ned said. He angled well away from the Nodal nonetheless. “That’s what the pilotry data says.”
“The pilotry data isn’t going to be dissolved from inside if a spore lands on it,” Boxall said. He laughed sharply. “Come to think, I guess it might. But it wouldn’t care the way I do.”
They were nearing the station. It was a hemisphere over a hundred meters in diameter. Antennas of complex shape festooned the dome and were planted in farms some distance away.
“I hear,” Boxall said after a moment, “that you might know something about the guy who mans the station. Gresham?”
Ned nodded, though he wasn’t sure how visible the action was beneath his suit. “I made something of a study of it,” he said. “Of him.”
There was a lot of information on Friesland, in the Slammers’ archives. Uncle Don had never said anything about it, except that he’d seen the prettiest sunset of his life once on Taprobane.
“Gresham worked for the Bonding Authority,” Ned said. “He was a field agent, new to the job. He talked too much. At least that was what prisoners said later.”
“He was bribed?” Boxall asked.
“No, he just talked. While he was inventorying mercs hired by the Congressional side on Taprobane, he let out that while there was supposed to have been a battalion of Slammers’ tanks landed in the capital to support the Presidential party and secure the spaceport, it was really only two infantry companies.”
The external speaker distorted Boxall’s whistle. “So the Congressional party took the spaceport,” he said.
“Nope,” Ned Slade said coldly. He’d watched images of the battle, mostly recovered from the helmet recorders of dead troopers. “But they sure-hell tried. And it wasn’t cheap to stop them, even for the survivors.”
They’d reached the dome. Close up, the structure loomed over them. Water condensing on the curved sides dripped down in sheets of gelatinous fungus—orange and saffron and a hundred shades of brown.
The light above the airlock blinked from red to green. Boxall pressed the latch button.
“Afterwards,” Ned said, “there were discussions between the regiment—”
“Colonel Hammer?”
Ned nodded. “Colonel Hammer. And the Bonding Authority. Everybody knew what Gresham had done, but all the evidence was secondhand. Handing Gresham over to the Slammers for execution would compromise the Authority’s prestige and neutrality. That was what the higher echelons felt, at any rate.”
The airlock door slid abruptly into the side of the dome. The chamber within was a meter square. The walls were glassy and faceted internally.
“What they did,” Ned said, “the Authority did, was to offer Gresham a contract. So long as he worked for the Authority, his life was safe. Not even Hammer’s Slammers were willing to murder an Authority employee.”
The door slammed home with the enthusiasm of a guillo tine’s blade. Ned’s visor went opaque for protection. Infrared light bathed the men from all six surfaces of the chamber. Ned bumped his companion as they both turned slowly, sure that the light cleansed every crevice of their suits.
“And then they transferred Gresham here, to Paixhans’ Node,” Ned said. “For as long as he lived. Seventeen years so far.”
His visor cleared. An instant later, the lock’s inner door shot open. Ned and his companion stepped into the foyer where empty suits stood or lay on the concrete floor. The air was muggy.
They stripped off their own suits and followed the sound of voices down a hall to a large room with equipment built to waist level around all the walls. Surfaces above the electronic consoles were of a gleaming white material that cleaned itself.
Most of the Swift’s complement stood and looked with neither comprehension nor particular interest at the equipment surrounding them. The Warson brothers squatted before a console. They weren’t touching the access plate in the front, but they were pointedly not touching the access plate. The fragments Ned heard of their low-voiced discussion were surprisingly technical.
“Look, Master Gresham,” Lissea said in the tone of someone forced to argue with a senile relative, “that’s between you and your employers. We’re perfectly willing to pay you—we’ll pay you in rations, if that’s what you’d like. But—”
“It wouldn’t do any good,” said the man to whom she spoke. He hunched in the room’s sole chair, a black structure which appeared to have been scooped from an egg. Its flat base quivered nervously at the floor, like a drop of water on a sea of mercury.
Gresham was sallow. His bones stuck out, and there were sores on his elbows and wrists.
“Master Gresham,” Tadziki said calmly. “We can’t afford to offend the Bonding Authority. All we’re asking from you is information on the Sole Solution.”
“On Alliance and Affray, you mean,” Gresham said. As he spoke, Ned noticed that the man’s teeth were black stumps. “On the Twin Planets.”
Gresham grinned with something approaching animation. “But you don’t know that. Yet. I’ll tell you everything you want to know. But you have to stop whoever’s stealing my food.”
“We’ll give you food!” Lissea repeated.
“It won’t help!” Gresham cried. He tried to get up from the chair, but he couldn’t summon the strength. He began to cry. Through the blubbering, he mumbled, “I have to eat the fungus. The rations dispenser drops a meal for me. And they steal it! They steal it! I have to eat what I gather outside or I’d die.”
In a tiny voice he added, “I want to die. I can tell you anything about anything in the galaxy. But I want to die.”
“Well, that could be arranged,” said Josie Paetz.
Yazov gripped his nephew’s jaw between his thumb and forefinger. “Don’t speak like that!” he said. “He’s a Bonding Authority employee. If he wants to die, then he can kill himself!”
Yazov released Paetz as though he was flinging away a bloody bandage. The younger man was white-faced. He swallowed before he holstered the pistol which he’d thrust into his uncle’s belly.
“Who steals the food?” Lissea asked. She seemed to have swept frustration out of her mind. “Not the Nodals, surely.”
“Who else is there?” Herne Lordling asked.
“I don’t know,” Gresham said. “I’ll show you, though. It’s almost time.”
Gresham snuffled loudly to clear his nose. He seemed almost oblivious of the presence of other human beings. Resupply ships would arrive on an annual, or at most, a semiannual schedule. The number of other vessels which touched down on Paixhans’ Node must be very small.
“Time for what?” Coyne asked. Everybody ignored him.
Gresham got up from his chair and stepped to the hallway door. He walked like an old man, his head down and his legs shuffling forward mechanically. Though he couldn’t have been much over fifty years old, deficiencies caused by a diet of local produce had aged and weakened him. He was lucky to be alive.
Or perhaps not.
Across the foyer from the control room was a chamber one meter by ten, with a high ceiling. The long wall facing the foyer was of a gleaming, glassy material like that which lined the airlock. There was a niche at waist height in the center of it.
“A Type Seven-Six Hundred Rations Dispenser,” Tadziki said approvingly. “Or maybe a Seven-Eight Hundred—it’s a matter of storage capacity, and I can’t be sure how deep the room is. It’s a bulletproof design. Trust the Authority to buy the best.”
“What is it?” Ingried said peevishly.
“When somebody’s alone in a station like this,” the adju tant explained, “you don’t want to leave all the rations under his control. People get funny. A dispenser like this provides his meals one at a time, so that he doesn’t decide to make a bonfire of a six-months’ supply when he’s having a bad time one night.”
“This poor bastard’s had a bad time longer ’n that,” somebody muttered.
A chime sounded softly in the bowels of the mechanism. A sealed carton about thirty by thirty by ten centimeters in size dropped into the niche. Gresham reached out as if to take it.
“As if,” because after seventeen years he certainly knew it was going to vanish again, as it did.
“Via! Bloody hell! Blood and martyrs!” across the semicircle of mercenaries standing behind Gresham. He turned, looking almost pleased.
“Stop that happening,” he said, “and I’ll help you. I’ll save you; I know how. You can’t give me my freedom, but let me eat food again.”
Lissea looked at Tadziki. He pursed his lips and said, “There’s the question of your employer’s intention in this matter—”
“No,” Gresham said. He fumbled carefully in a breast pocket of his coveralls and brought out a folded sheet of hard copy between two fingers. He handed it to Tadziki.
Tadziki opened the document. “‘Inspection of the Type Seven-Six Hundred dispenser by manufacturer’s representatives indicates the unit is in proper working order,’” he said/read aloud. “‘This office will not authorize further off-site repair expenditures. If station personnel desire, they may procure local support and charge back costs within Guidelines Bee Three three-nine-four to Bee Four ought-ought-seven inclusive.’”
Gresham began to cry again. “Sixteen years ago they sent that,” he said. “They don’t care if I starve so long as they can say they stood up to Colonel Hammer!”
“Seventeen years seems a pretty long time,” Lissea said doubtfully.
“It’s that much longer than some eighty poor bastards got on Taprobane,” Deke Warson said in a voice that could mill corn. Ned wasn’t the only member of the company who knew why Gresham had been exiled to this planet-sized dungeon.
“Which brings up the other question,” the adjutant went on. “I think we can presume the problem with the food—whatever—isn’t the Authority’s doing, though it doesn’t appear to bother them a great deal. I suspect that—President now, isn’t it?—Hammer might still be displeased by meddling with what he considers his business.”
Lissea looked puzzled. “Surely that’s no concern of ours, is it?” she asked.
The Boxall brothers had been talking in low tones ever since the meal container vanished. Now Louis looked up and said, “If it’s a choice of the Bonding Authority or Colonel Hammer wanting my hide, I guess I’d choose Hammer. But believe me, Gene and me aren’t going to fix this if Hammer is involved.”
“You can fix it?” Tadziki said sharply.
“We might be able to do some good,” Eugene said in the tone of someone making a promise with everything but the form of the words.
“But not if it pisses off Hammer,” Louis repeated. “Sure, it’s a big universe, but I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder.”
“I think I can clear things,” Ned said. His hands were trembling, but he kept his voice steady.
“You, Slade?” Herne Lordling sneered. “You’re going to use your vast influence as a reserve ensign to bring President Hammer around?”
“Herne!” Lissea said.
“Slade?” said Gresham. “You’re Slade?”
“You’re thinking of Uncle Don,” Ned said to Gresham. He looked at Lordling. “I don’t have any influence with President Hammer,” he said. “I saw him once on a reviewing stand, that’s all. But my uncle commanded the regiment’s initial force on Taprobane.”
“You’re Slade,” Gresham whispered. He reached toward Ned but his hand paused a centimeter away, shaking violently.
Ned gripped Gresham’s hand. “I’ll need to send a real-time message to Nieuw Friesland.”
His eyes focused on Lissea. “I’ll pay for it personally,” he added.
She shook her head. “It’s an expedition expense,” she said.
Gresham began to giggle hysterically. Ned had to hold the older man to keep him from falling.
At last Gresham got control of himself again. “I’ve been here for seventeen years,” he said. “They pay me well—there’s a hardship allowance. And there’s nothing for me to buy. I’ll pay for the cursed message!”
They walked back into the control room. Ned and Tadziki supported Gresham; Ned thought of offering to carry the man but decided it might be an insult.
Gresham unlocked a keyboard. A holographic screen sprang to life above the console. He typed in his access code, summoned a directory for Nieuw Friesland, and added an ad dress to the transmission. He seemed both expert and much stronger while he worked.
He lurched out of the chair. “There,” he said to Ned. “Go ahead. When you’re done, hit send.”
Ned sat down, paused, and began by typing his serial number. He heard his fellows whispering behind him. The two men who’d come from the ship most recently hushed as others filled them in on events in the dome.
Letters of gray light formed in the hologram field:
RESERVE ENSIGN SLADE, E., WISHES TO INFORM PRESIDENT HAMMER THAT HE PROPOSES ON HIS SOLE RESPONSIBILITY TO CORRECT AN ANOMALY IN THE FOOD DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM OF THE BONDING AUTHORITY STATION ON PAIXHANS’ NODE. THIS ACTION WILL TAKE PLACE IN THREE STANDARD HOURS FROM SLUG TIME. OUT.
“How do you walk with balls that big, kid?” Toll Warson asked in a friendly tone.
Ned tried to get up from the chair. The first time, his legs failed to support him and he fell back.
“So now we wait three hours,” Tadziki said in a neutral voice.
“Captain,” Louis Boxall said, “we’ll need some apparatus to make this work. Can you give us a hand with the shopwork? You’re the best hand with the hardware on the Swift.”
“I’m not sure I’m willing to go through with this, Tadziki,” Lissea said. Her eyes were on Ned.
“It’s my responsibility!” Ned shouted. “You will not interfere with matters that are my responsibility!”
Men looked away. “Touchy little feller, ain’t he?” Deke Warson murmured to the ceiling.
“All right, Boxall,” Lissea said. “Come back to the ship with me and we’ll build your apparatus.”
“We can only clear one suit at a time with the hand sterilizer, ma’am,” Eugene said doubtfully. “Should we wait a couple minutes, Lou and I?”
“No, you can curst well stand outside the ship while I clear through the airlock!” Lissea replied as she stamped into the foyer. “This is your idea!”
To Ned’s surprise but perhaps not to Tadziki’s, there was a reply. Gresham’s console logged it in eighty-eight minutes after Ned had sent the query on its forty-one-minute route to Nieuw Friesland. Hard copy scrolled from the printer, but the assembled men read the message from the screen:
INFORMATION NOTED. IF YOU’RE WILLING TO ANSWER TO YOUR UNCLE, THERE’S NOTHING USEFUL I COULD SAY. HAMMER.
Herne Lordling swore under his breath.
Ned said, “My uncle Don understands what it’s like.”
He spoke loudly but without a specific listener in mind. His mind was a collage of memories, views of a big man with a smiling mouth and eyes that could drill an anvil.
“He won’t second-guess the man on the ground.”
Gresham was crying.
Save for the anchor watch, the Swift’s complement was assembled in the station foyer. It was a change of scenery from the interior of the vessel, though a sterile one. Paixhans’ Node wasn’t a world which encouraged spacers to sightsee during their stopovers.
“Ten minutes till the next feeding, then?” Tadziki said after glancing at the clock above the door to the supply alcove.
Gresham nodded sluggishly. He’d eaten a ration bar from the Swift. It was the closest thing he’d had to a balanced diet since a similar offering from the most recent supply ship months before.
The station ran on Zulu Time: a twenty-four hour clock based on that of Earth at the Greenwich Meridian. It was as good a choice as any, since planetary rotation didn’t affect the bright skies and the personnel weren’t expected to go outside often anyway.
The inner lock cycled to admit the Boxall brothers and Lissea. The three of them had squeezed into the decontamination chamber together.
“That’s not safe,” Gresham complained. “You might miss a spore—”
Lissea opened her helmet. “Shut up, Gresham,” she said.
Ned looked away from her.
“Well, I suppose if you’re careful . . .” Gresham mumbled.
“We got it done,” Eugene Boxall said. “Are we in time?”
Tadziki shrugged. “Eight minutes,” he said. “Then twelve hours to the next, ah, load.”
“Plenty of time,” said Louis. “Plenty of time.”
He opened the front of his pressure suit and held out the egg-shaped case he’d carried inside the garment. “We’re going to need one of you to go along with us,” he continued. “Slade, that’s you if you’re up to it.”
Ned reached for the egg. “You bet,” he said.
Herne Lordling snatched the object from Boxall’s hand. “Negative,” he said. “I’ll go.”
Eugene dropped his suit on the floor of the foyer. “Look, Lordling,” he said. “This isn’t about shooting. This particularly isn’t about shooting.”
“Give him the scrambler, Herne,” Lissea said. “Ned was my recommendation for the job.”
Lordling glared at the Boxalls, then Lissea. He refused to look at Ned, and he continued to hold the object. Without speaking to one another, the Warsons shifted in concert to put themselves at two corners of an isosceles triangle with Lordling the third point. If shooting started, the brothers wouldn’t be in one another’s line of fire.
“We’re not,” Tadziki said, “in that much of a hurry.” He stepped forward so that he was between Lordling and the Warsons, looking from Deke to Toll and back with a glum expression.
“Take the curst thing!” Lordling said. He thrust the object out to the side, not so much handing it to Ned as dissociating himself from what happened to it.
The egg was heavy. Within the clear plastic case, Ned could see a power supply and what he thought was an oscillator.
“Whoever’s taking the food,” Eugene resumed, “he’s got to be a Wimbledon teleport like ourselves. Now I know, five meters is usually good distance and here we’re maybe talking thousands of parsecs.”
“But this is the Node,” his twin said, taking up the theme. “We figure he could be coming from anywhere, anywhere in the galaxy. In and out like a pop-up target.”
“Fine, but why?” Toll Warson asked.
Lissea looked at Gresham coldly. “I assume because somebody paid him to make this gentleman’s life a little more miserable,” she said. “But not to kill him.”
“You see what we meant about Colonel Hammer,” Louis said. “Seventeen years means a long memory.”
“We don’t want the guy killed,” Eugene said. “Not if there’s any other way. He’s just doing his job.”
Harlow laughed. “I’ve killed lots of people who was just doing their job,” he said. “Via, I killed plenty who just happened to be standing on the wrong piece of real estate. We all of us have.”
He looked around the band of mercenaries, inviting argument.
“Wimbledon isn’t a very big place,” Louis said. When his face flushed, the scar on his temple stood out more sharply. “We’re doing this our way or not at all.”
“I said that Ned,” Lissea said, “could be trusted not to shoot unless there was no other choice.”
Ned dabbed his lips with his tongue. “Thank you, Lissea,” he said.
“We’re going to carry you with us,” Eugene said to Ned.
“You can do that?” Westerbeke demanded. “Carry stuff with you when you teleport?”
“It’s a lot harder to jump out of your clothes than it is to wear them with you,” Louis said. “Likewise the bubble of air around you.”
“Him, he’s heavy enough to be a problem,” Eugene said with a nod toward Ned. “But we’re good.”
“Via, we’re the best!”
The twins looked scarcely teenaged in their glow of anticipation. They knew as surely as everyone else in the company did that there were stronger men and better shots on every side of them now—but this was their skill, and there was nobody like them in the galaxy.
“When he comes, we follow him,” Eugene continued. “We don’t know where that’ll be. Anywhere in the galaxy, like I say. When we get there, you trigger this.”
His index finger indicated the thumb switch on top of the egg in Ned’s hand.
“It’s an RF scrambler,” Louis explained. “It’ll disorient any teleport within maybe five meters of it. Us included, that’s the problem.”
“Optical would work as well as radio frequency,” Eugene said, “but we don’t know where we’re going. It has to function if he’s turned away or there’s a wall between us or something.”
“Via! I forgot the tape,” Louis said. “Did you bring the tape?”
“I brought the tape,” said Lissea. She handed Ned a roll of black, 75-mm tape. The adhesive was alcohol-soluble, but you could lift the bow of a tank on a properly rigged cable of the stuff.
“When we get there,” Eugene repeated, “you trigger the scrambler. The guy’ll probably fall down.”
“We’ll sure fall down,” Louis said. “It’s like having the worst headache ever in your life.”
His twin shrugged. “It stops when the oscillator stops,” he said. “But don’t turn it off till you’ve got his eyes bandaged with the tape. Otherwise he’ll likely jump again, and maybe we won’t be ready to follow.”
“One minute,” said Tadziki.
Ned had come to the station unarmed. Lissea held out to him the submachine gun she’d brought on this trip from the Swift.
“I don’t think I’ll need this,” Ned said.
“The teleport should be helpless,” Lissea said, “but he may not be alone wherever he comes out. Take it.”
Eugene Boxall shrugged. “Hey look,” he said. “We don’t want anybody croaking us while the scrambler’s on, either. Do what you’ve got to do.”
“Nearing time!” Tadziki said sharply.
Ned slung the submachine gun over his shoulder and stuck his right arm through the spool of tape. The twins gripped his wrists firmly, as if they were preparing for a trapeze act.
A chime sounded in the dispenser. The meal packet landed in the niche with a choonk—
Ned’s mind everted in a blaze of dazzling light.
The room was sunlit through a netlike screen across one whole wall. The Boxalls gripped Ned’s wrists crushingly. The figure directly in front of the mercenaries was turning as Ned’s thumb mashed down the scrambler switch.
The stranger, a woman with long, curling hair, flung up her hands with a cry of pain. Louis Boxall collapsed like a steer in the abattoir, but Eugene thrashed wildly and continued to hold Ned.
The switch had a detent to lock it until a second thrust released the spring. Ned dropped the unit. It bounced on a floor covered with long, meter-wide rugs laid edgewise and overlapping by half their width. He used both hands to break Eu gene’s grip, then turned his attention to the woman.
She was short, young, and strikingly beautiful in a smooth-skinned, plumpish style. The scrambler’s invisible impact had driven her to her knees. Her eyes were closed, and she squeezed her temples with clenched fists while she made cackling sounds.
Ned yanked the roll of tape off his arm. He stretched a length, slapped it over the woman’s eyes, and knocked her hands aside so that he could complete the loop around her head.
The submachine gun swung like a heavy pendulum, getting in his way. He set it on the floor with hasty care—there was one up the spout, and no safety could be trusted absolutely— before he finished the job of blindfolding the woman.
Breathing hard, more from stress than actual exertion, Ned looked for the scrambler. It had rolled beneath the legs of an intricate brass floorlamp. Ned poked the switch again to release it.
This was a very nice room, tasteful as well as expensively decorated. The window overlooked a parklike city from thirty stories up. The glazed surface curved to include half the ceiling as well, showing that this was the penthouse. The long wall opposite displayed two large abstracts, coolly precise, which flanked a curtained doorway. There was relatively little furniture, but pillows heaped against the short walls would serve as chairs or couches.
Louis Boxall raised himself to a squat. “Lord, Lord,” he muttered. “Did anybody get the number of the truck that hit me?”
“Hey, it’s a girl,” Eugene said with considerably more animation. He still lay on the rugs, but his eyes were open and turned toward the captive. She was beginning to stir also.
“Rise and shine, troopers,” Ned said. “I’ve done my part. The rest is up to you.”
A man walked through the curtained doorway. “Tanya?” he said. His face blurred in surprise at the scene. He reached into the pocket of his flaring jacket.
Instead of snatching the submachine gun, Ned grabbed a double handful of a rug. He yanked at it, thrusting off with his legs as well as using his upper body to pull.
The newcomer’s feet flew up. His arms flailed and the back of his head clunked into the wall. A needle stunner flew from his hand into a corner of the room.
“Father?” the girl called. She jumped to her feet, her face terrified beneath the band of tape. “Father!”
“He’s all right!” Ned said as he grabbed the man. He pulled the man’s jacket down to bind his arms while he was still logy, then checked the pockets for further weapons. There were none. The fellow’s hair was coarse and black, but by the looks of his facial wrinkles he was probably in his sixties.
“Father?”
“Who are you?” the man asked.
“Hold him,” Ned said, swinging the stranger toward Louis. He scooped up the submachine gun and quickly checked the remainder of the suite. There were two large bedrooms, two baths, and a fully equipped kitchen/dining room. No one else was present, and the exterior door was secured with a 5-cm steel bar as well as a pair of electronic locks.
Ned walked back into the living room. “All clear,” he said. He tossed Eugene a bottle of clear liquor.
“Meet the Glieres, Slade,” Louis said. “Oleg, and his daughter, Tanya. We’re just explaining to them that their contract with Colonel Hammer is now at an end.”
Eugene wetted the tip of the neckerchief he wore over his tunic with the liquor. It had a minty odor. He dabbed alcohol onto the tape, starting at the woman’s hairline. Oleg watched nervously. There obviously wasn’t any fight in him.
“Where are we, anyway?” Ned asked, looking out the window. It was a lovely city, wherever it was.
“Wonderland,” Tanya said. She had a throaty, attractive voice that fit her physical person. “In the Trigeminid Cluster.”
Ned shrugged. He’d never heard of the place—which implied that Wonderland had never been a market for mercenary soldiers, an even better recommendation than the broad swathes of landscaping among the buildings below.
“I . . .” Oleg said. He looked as though he wanted to sit down but didn’t dare to. Louis gestured him toward a pile of pillows. “We’ll of course do what you say. But I hope Colonel Hammer won’t be offended.”
“Oh,” Ned said, rummaging in his breast pocket. He came out with two flimsies: the hard copies of his message to Friesland and Hammer’s reply. He handed them to Gliere, who read, then reread the documents to be sure of their meaning.
Eugene lifted the cargo tape from Tanya’s eyes. She had remained perfectly still during the process, but now she shuddered and said, “Oh thank God, thank God. I was blind.”
“We needed to talk with you,” Eugene said, “so that, you know, it could stop with talking.”
Louis took the liquor bottle from his brother and swigged it. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but my head feels like somebody’s been using it for a rabbit hutch.”
“You’re from Wimbledon too?” Tanya asked.
“Where else?” Eugene said. He loosened the last tag of adhesive and dropped the blindfold onto the floor. “You’ve both been doing this, then?”
“I don’t jump very well anymore,” Oleg said. “My age, you know.”
A muscle in Louis’ cheek quivered. Nobody likes to be reminded that he will inevitably grow too old to perform his specialty.
“Tanya has taken over the duties this past five years,” Oleg went on, “so that we didn’t lose the retainer.”
“We don’t need the money!” his daughter said sharply. “My paintings already earn more than this theft does.” She looked from Louis to Eugene and patted her disarranged hair. “I’m glad it’s over.”
“It’s got to be,” Eugene said. He offered the bottle to Tanya, then drank after her. The twins’ eyes were approving.
“Do you suppose we could get back to Paixhans’ Node?” Ned said. “They’re going to be wondering about things until we report.”
“Slave driver,” Louis said. He bent and scooped up the meal container Tanya had dropped when the pursuit arrived. “Look, though,” he said, glancing between the Glieres, “I’ll be back to visit, if you don’t have objections.”
“We’ll be back,” Eugene added. He put his boot on the scrambler and crushed it, despite the layers of carpet beneath the object. “We don’t meet many of our sort off Wimbledon.”
“We,” Tanya Gliere said, “would like that.”
Half a dozen of the mercenaries in the foyer were singing “Sam Hall,” entranced with the acoustics of the room and the long corridors curving off it. Deke Warson reached into the guts of the ration dispenser and shouted over the racket, “Who wants a . . .” He paused to rip open the meal packet. “Roast duckling!”
“Warson, both of you!” Tadziki ordered. “Go easy on the food. Remember it’ll be two months before the next supply ship.”
Deke and Toll had opened the loading gate of the dispenser so quickly and easily that Ned didn’t imagine the resupply crew could have beaten their time. Whether or not the two had rigged their brother’s vehicle to blow up, they certainly had the expertise to do so.
“My Nellie’s down below all dressed in blue.”
“I assure you, Master Gresham,” Lissea said, “that we’ll leave ration packets to make up for those we’re consuming tonight. I can’t pretend the quality will be up to those the Authority supplies, though.”
“Says my Nellie dressed in blue—”
Gresham laughed so hard that he began to hiccup. “Oh, Mistress Doormann,” he said. “Oh, Mistress Doormann, there’s always the fungus outside.”
“—now I know that you’ll be true—”
He’d eaten half a packet of spiced meatloaf, then had promptly vomited the whole contents of his stomach back up. Now he wore a fresh uniform and picked carefully at the remainder of the meal.
“Yes I know that you’ll be true, goddam your eyes!”
Tadziki looked from the cheerful mercenaries to Gresham. “You agree that we’ve carried out our part of the bargain, I trust? Then it’s time for you to do your part.”
Gresham and the Swift’s complement ate at tables and benches built from maintenance stores: plating, tubes, and boxes that could be used to repair the antennas outside and the electronic modules within the dome. Minor tasks were a part of Gresham’s duties, while larger ones—a tower which col lapsed in a storm, for example—had to wait for the supply ship to arrive.
Gresham blinked as the adjutant spoke. He started to rise immediately, mumbling, “Of course, of course—”
He was trying to lever himself up from the table, but his wrist buckled. Ned grabbed the frail civilian before he fell facedown in the meatloaf.
Lissea looked fiercely at Tadziki. “I don’t think we need be in that much of a hurry,” she said.
The Boxall brothers stepped into the makeshift banquet hall, carrying a case of bottles between them. They set the load down on the concrete.
“Hey, come and have dinner!” Deke Warson called from the dispenser. He reached down for another pair of meals.
“Have a good trip!” Louis replied. The twins vanished in the same eyeblink.
Everyone looking in the teleports’ direction fell silent. Ned and Tadziki both jumped to their feet, but Lissea beat them to the case of bottles.
There was a note on it, folded into a fan. She opened it. “Shut up, you lot!” Tadziki ordered.
“‘Dear Captain,’” Lissea read aloud. “‘We’re going to leave you here. Hope you think we were worth our rations, and you can keep the pay.’”
She looked up. “They both signed it,” she added.
“Deserters!” Herne Lordling said.
The adjutant lifted a bottle from its foam cocoon. “Iron Star Liquors,” he said, reading the label. He shook the clear liquor.
“It’s mint-flavored,” Ned said. And it cleaned the adhesive off cargo tape about as quickly as industrial alcohol could.
Lissea looked at Ned and raised an eyebrow.
“They made a friend on Wonderland,” he said. He didn’t have any idea of what domestic arrangements on Wimbledon were like. “I guess they figured they . . . Well, I don’t know how long it’d take to get to the Trigeminid Cluster in normal fashion.”
Lissea shrugged. “They earned their keep,” she said. She tossed a bottle to Toll Warson, another to Westerbeke in the center of the singers, and a third to Coyne at the far table.
Noisy enthusiasm echoed around the foyer.
Lissea looked at Ned. “And so did you,” she added in a barely audible tone.
“There’s been no astrophysical change in the Sole Solution,” Gresham said from the console attached to a projection screen. “The change—the problem preventing normal navi gation—was wholly political.”
The station administrator was a different man since the thefts of his food were ended. He hadn’t regained his physical health from a few normal meals; in some ways, long-term deficiencies had damaged him beyond complete recovery. Mentally, however, Gresham was free of the strain that had hagridden him over his years of exile. He spoke distinctly and with obvious command of his material.
“The Twin Worlds,” he continued, “Alliance and Affray, are close enough to the Sole Solution through Transit space that they are virtually a part of the anomaly. A generation ago, the Twin Worlds completed the cooperative project that had absorbed a significant portion of their planetary output for nearly twenty standard years.”
A torus bloomed in the center of the holographic projection. The object had no scale, no apparent size. Gresham worked a detached control wand with a cold smile on his face, focusing the image on half the screen down to increasingly small portions of the doughnut displayed in full beside it.
“Blood and martyrs!” said Westerbeke. “How big is the f*cker?”
“There are occupied satellites of considerably smaller diameter,” Gresham said with cold amusement. “It doesn’t have a name. Technically, it’s Twin Worlds Naval Unit One. They call it the Dreadnought.”
The small-scale image focused on a weapons blister from which three tubes projected. A tribarrel, Ned thought; until the scale shrank still further and he saw that the specks on the outside of the turret were men. The guns must have bores of nearly a meter.
“But what do they do with it?” Lissea asked. “You could never invade a planet with that.”
All of the ship’s crewmen—save Dewey, on anchor watch—were in the station’s control room. Some of the other off-duty mercenaries hadn’t bothered to come. They didn’t re gard navigation as anything to concern them. Even on a planet as boring as Paixhans’ Node, they preferred to play cards and drink the remainder of the Boxalls’ parting gift.
“The Dreadnought was built to control trade through the Sole Solution,” Gresham said. “To end all trade except for what was carried on Twin Worlds hulls. They require merchants to land on either Alliance or Affray and to transfer their cargo to local vessels.”
“Will they sell ships to outsiders?” Tadziki asked.
“No,” Gresham said. “Nor, if you were considering it, would they permit you to reflag the Swift as a Twin Worlds vessel.”
“I suppose they charge monopoly rates for their services?” Ned said. The point didn’t matter since Lissea wasn’t about to leave the Swift behind, but it showed that he was awake.
“Of course,” Gresham agreed. “Since the Dreadnought has been operating, the value of trade through the Sole Solution has dropped to five percent of the previous annual total. This has hurt many planets, particularly those of the Pocket. The situation is satisfactory to the Twin Worlds themselves because their combined planetary income has increased markedly.”
“Why doesn’t somebody do something about it?” Toll Warson asked.
His voice wasn’t quite as relaxed as he had wanted it to sound. The Warsons were as close to being functioning anarchists as anyone Ned had met. The notion of imposed authority was genuinely offensive to them. That they’d spent all their lives in the rigid hierarchies of military systems implied an insane dichotomy.
It also implied they’d been very good to have survived this long, but that was true of almost everybody aboard the Swift. By now, everybody. Even Ned Slade.
“Economics,” Lissea said before Gresham could answer. “There are planets and planetary combines which could take this thing out of play.”
She gestured at the hologram. The scale had shrunk to show that the Dreadnought did mount tribarrels. The installations on the main battery turrets looked as though they had been planted on flat steel plains.
“But a fleet that could accomplish that would take years to build, decades. Nobody with the resources had a good enough reason to employ them for the purpose.”
“Precisely,” Gresham said, a teacher approving his student’s answer. It was hard to equate this man with the whimpering wreck who’d greeted the Swift on its arrival.
“We’ll come back to the problem,” Gresham continued. He blanked the display. “Now, as to a rest-and-resupply point on this side of the Sole Solution, you’ll land at Burr-Detlingen.”
“Will we, now?” Deke Warson murmured.
The screen panned across a gullied plain with little vegetation. There were occasional human-built structures, all of them in ruins.
“There’s no settled agriculture,” Gresham said. “No human society since the wars, really. The atmosphere is ideal, and you’ll be able to replenish your water supply from wells. Do you have equipment for processing raw biomass into edibles?”
“No,” Tadziki said. “That’d be too bulky for a ship of the Swift’s size.”
“Well, you should be able to shoot animals for fresh meat,” Gresham said. The image slid across a family of rangy herbivores, perhaps originally sheep or goats of Earth stock.
“On the other side of the Sole Solution,” Gresham said as he blanked the display again, “is Buin. I can’t really recommend it as a stopover, however. I think you’d be better off to continue to one of the developed worlds further into the Pocket.”
“We’ll need copies of all your navigational data for the Pocket,” Lissea said.
“We’ve already downloaded it into the Swift,” Westerbeke assured her.
“All right,” Lissea said. “I want to avoid developed worlds wherever possible.”
“And there’s the time factor,” Tadziki said. “The nearest alternative landing point is another five days beyond Buin.”
“Bugger that for a lark,” a mercenary muttered. Under weigh, the Swift differed from a prison by having far less available space for those enclosed.
“Yes,” Gresham said tartly. “The problem with Buin is the autochthonal race.”
The display flopped from a pale white glow to the image of a gray-skinned creature beside a scale in decimeters. The Buinite was about two meters tall, within the human range, but its legs were only half the length of its arms and torso. The jaw was square, with powerful teeth bared in a snarl. One big hand carried a stone. Ned couldn’t tell from the image whether the stone had been shaped or not.
“They don’t look like much of a problem,” Harlow said. “Nothing a shot or two won’t cure.”
“Individually, you’re correct,” Gresham said with no hint of agreement. “The autochthones’ technology doesn’t go beyond stakes and rocks—”
The hologram shifted to a panorama. Buin was rocky, and the vegetation tended toward blues and grays rather than green. A band of twenty or so autochthones was scattered across the field of view, turning over stones and sometimes probing holes with simple tools. They wore no clothing, though some of the medium-sized adults slung food objects on cords across their shoulders.
“Nor have they traded with travelers to gain modern weapons,” Gresham continued.
“Do they have anything to trade?” Ned asked.
“Not really,” Gresham said, “but the question doesn’t arise. The autochthones invariably kill everyone who lands on their planet, unless he escapes immediately.”
“I’d like to see them try that,” Herne Lordling said. For once, the muttered chorus of other mercenaries was fully in support of his comment.
“You will, sir,” Gresham said. “You assuredly will, if you land on Buin.”
He switched the image to an overhead view of a mound. Vegetation hadn’t started to claim the raw earth mixed with boulders the size of cottages.
“Artificial?” Lissea said.
“Yes,” said Gresham. “And at the bottom of it, there’s a starship, the Beverly. Autochthones damaged her engines with thrown rocks—”
The hologram switched to a Buinite stretching his left arm out behind him, then snapping forward like a sprung bear trap. The stone that shot from his hand sailed a hundred, perhaps a hundred and fifty meters in a flat arc before it hit the ground. Ned judged that the projectile weighed about as much as a man’s head.
“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 . . .”