Voyage Across the Stars (27 page)

The concentration of microlife and the leakage of juices from the processing drew larger beasts upstream. They could be seen playing as black shadows about the tubing—two meters long, three meters; one of them five meters at least, Danny would swear. It looked as slippery as a flame and as ravenous. No danger to the filter lines, perhaps; but sure death to any landsman who slipped from the bucket into the water.

Don Slade looked up, mildly startled as the bucket slid to a halt at his guard station. The rails and the catwalk supporting them stretched further out to the posts manned by Chesson and Leaf. Each of the men were responsible for five hundred meters of line. Slade had been bending over the rail. He held a rocket gun in his right hand as if it were a giant pistol. In Slade’s left, when he straightened so that it could be seen, was a length of twelve-centimeter tubing. He had been prodding it down into the water.

“Hey, snake,” Slade called cheerfully. “Come watch me improve my technique.” The tanker bent over the rail again.

Pritchard walked carefully to the bigger man. The filter lines, with the platforms and slideway above them, did not attempt to remain rigid in the sea. Strong as the lines were, the sea was stronger. If the apparatus did not give and flow with the moods of the water, the water would smash it with the casual ease of a vandal with a shop window. Knowing the necessity for flexibility did not prevent the motion from making Danny Pritchard queasy. “All right, trooper,” the Adjutant said as he joined Slade at the rail. “What’ve you got—Via!”

The thing that twisted up through the water had a long nose-spike and ragged teeth the color of blood. Like a trap slamming, it struck the tube Slade used as a lure. The tube sprang upward. It was almost wrenched from Slade’s grip. At the surface of the water, refraction bent the white tubing sharply. A meter below that hinge, the jaws were grinding the tough plastic into drifting motes.

Slade fired. When the shell struck it the sea fountained, reaching for the gun muzzle with lambent clarity. Then the water boiled red as the charge blew apart the carnivore’s head. The nose-spike and part of the upper jaw lifted from the explosion, then splashed back into the water.

The creature’s body began to drift, still writhing, beneath the filter line. Part of the cloud of blood preceding the carcass had been sucked into the line already with the plankton.

Slade pulled up his ragged-ended lure. “You see,” he said, “I know where the end of the tube is.” He tapped the plastic with the muzzle of his gun. “So I shoot for that, where I
feel
the tube is, and that teaches me how much to hold off when there’s only what I can see the next time.”

“They hit on this?” Danny asked, tapping the white plastic. He had expected the tube to have a soft, greasy feel, but it rang like steel beneath his fingernail. This was pressure tubing for repairs to the compaction segment.

“They do when I wire some meat onto it,” the tanker said with a grin. “Hungry as some of those beggars act, they might anyway. Shows you what greed gets you.

“And—” his face cooled—“that brings us to the question of Bev Dyson, doesn’t it? If they say anything as bad about him at the House as they do down here, then I regret nobody called me home before. I started a job near thirty years ago with a wrench, and it sounded like it’s past time to finish it.”

Pritchard stretched. He laced his fingers behind his back and lifted his arms as high as he could. With his eyes closed against the hugeness of the sea, the lift and fall of the platform was even soothing. “I’m the honored visitor touring the estate,” he said while still bent forward. “Your sister-in-law loaned me a car.” Pritchard straightened and looked at his big friend squarely. “Tough lady, but she needs help. What she doesn’t need is you barging in and getting your ass blown away, snake.”

“I said you were in charge, Danny,” Slade said mildly. The big man scanned the sensor read-outs on his board. One of them was flickering orange, a beast rippling to and from a distant portion of filter line, nothing to be concerned about as yet. Slade’s fingers pulled a rocket from a bandolier loop and slid it into the loading gate of the weapon. “Tell me what you think needs doing, and I’ll see about getting it done.”

“There’s a Council meeting in two days,” said Pritchard. “They’re gathering in person at the House, the whole Council. Going to decide on the guardianship of your nephew Teddy.”

“Council’s in Dyson’s pocket,” Slade said without emotion. He nodded toward the station, though two of the men were actually downline of Slade’s post. “What the crew here says is just what I saw myself. The Port’s supposed to be neutral ground. Dyson put his own men in and my brother—”

Slade’s big hand squeezed fiercely on the alloy barrel of his gun—”let him do it, the. . . . Well. So now they’re all afraid to burp for fear their cargo’ll get looted or deep-sixed, inbound and out both. He’s got the votes he needs, just like he did on that stupid business of me being the real heir. Cop!”

Danny looked at the bigger man sharply. “You could be, you know,” Pritchard said. “Marilee swears that your brother told her that the night your father died. That your father had whispered it to him, just at the end.”

“And
I
swear, my friend,” replied Don Slade, “that it’s cop even if it’s true. Look, what do seventeen minutes one way or the other matter, for running this, running
Tethys
—that’s what we Slades have done for six generations, Council be damned. You think if I’d really wanted it, that I’d have let a few minutes stand in the way? Blood and Martyrs, snake,
you
know me better than that!”

Pritchard laughed. “Well, you were younger, then,” he said.

Slade grinned back. “Yeah, and meaner’n a knife-jaw, my friend. Via, remember that bar on Emporion? The bouncer thought I was just blowing air till my tank came through the wall!”

Both men laughed and linked arms. “Well,” said Pritchard, “let’s say you rode in to the House on a supply truck tomorrow. I’ve seen what you looked like before you left Tethys: hair to your belt. I’m willing to bet that without that and the beard, maybe a little dye and editing, there’s nobody you’ll see who’s going to recognize you this long after. Not if you got through the Port. Now, there’s likely to be a problem in the yard itself, but I think . . .”

Danny Pritchard continued to talk in a calm, professional voice while the big man beside him nodded. Overhead, fairy skimmers folded their gossamer wings and dived into the rich sea life around the platform.

Slade simply noted their delicate motions. He knew that he could handle moving targets without any need to practice on these.

Fadel Buckalew, a Steward’s Assistant, drove his provisions truck with a hard-handed determination. He managed to ground the steel skirts jarringly on the shingle a number of times, though without achieving more than a moderate speed. Slade had never claimed to be much of a driver himself, but at least the tanker did not regard air cushion vehicles with an angry hostility the way the young Houseman did.

“So,” Buckalew said, “old Piet tells me you met the Mad Dog and that’s why he’s sending you to the House. That a fact?”

“Something close,” said the tanker. He knew that Pretorius had never referred to his “Master Donald” as Mad Dog Slade. “Came in on the same ship as a visitor to the House, guy named Pritchard. In Transit I’d mentioned meeting a Captain Slade of Hammer’s Regiment on his way back to Tethys himself. When Pritchard got to the House and heard how things were, he thought I ought to go tell the Mistress my story. The foreman thought so too.”

The truck ground its left side against the rocks beneath the layer of creeping native vegetation. Though some of the nastier forms of sea life bred on Tethys’ scattered islands, there was nothing native to the land which was significantly developed, even the plants. Terran vegetation had been imported, but it grew over the rocky soil only where encouraged: around the manors of the Councilors, and in small plots, among the dwellings of lesser folk.

The sea supplied roughage as it did protein through processing plants like the one Slade was leaving. When people grew vegetables, it was for the sake of luxury or whim, not need. The grass plots, though, served a need: that of Earth-evolved humans to see something green that was not synthetic nor the sea’s metallic choice of dress for the moment.

“Well, it’s none of my business,” the Houseman said, “but if I was you, I’d go back to sucking seawater. Not that
I
would,” he added hastily as he realized that he had just suggested a position of basic labor was not beneath him.

“But I mean,” Buckalew went on, “you’re safe back there—” He gestured. The truck slewed and grated. “But if you go up to the House, meddling with Council affairs, well . . . the Mistress may be glad to see you, I don’t say she wouldn’t be. But there’s some wouldn’t, and you’ll meet them before you do her.”

“Yeah,” said Slade, “I was kind of hoping you might drop me around in back.”

Slade was uncomfortable with the conversation and with his outfit. The Station Six crew had been adamant that nobody in coveralls would be allowed into Slade House now unless the Mistress led them in by the hand. Master Thomas had been a stickler for proprieties, Pretorius said. Chesson was young, but even he could remember the free and easy days when labor was nothing to be ashamed of and working for the Slades was all you needed to talk to the Councilor.

Don’s father had not been a gun-toting brawler like his own progenitor, a throwback to the harsh days of the Settlement. Neither, however, had he stood on ceremony with those who served him. The tanker found it interesting that his brother had insisted on such punctillio, when according to that code—and his own belief—he had no right to be called Councilor at all.

Well, people did strange things, and tanks did strange things. Don Slade had learned to deal with some of the strangeness without bothering himself too much with causes.

Dealing with the problem meant, in this case, wearing the non-service clothes Danny Pritchard sent along for Slade to wear. The tunic was russet, with puffy sleeves gathered at the wrists. It was big enough for Slade’s shoulders and would have held two of him at the waist. The slacks were doe-skin, again ample in the waist and thighs—but so tight when his calf muscles bulged that the tanker had considered slitting them up from the cuffs.

Slade wore the boots he had awakened with at the Port. They fit; and he might soon have need for footwork.

Buckalew had taken his time about answering his passenger’s implied question. “Well, I tell you,” the Houseman said with a sidelong glance which shifted the truck, “I’m sorry, and you not used to the House and all . . . but it’d be worth my teeth at the best if I got smart about where I pulled in. Especially with the load I’m carrying from your buddies in Six.”

“What’s in the load?” Slade asked in surprise.

“Nothing, that’s what’s in the bloody load!” the Houseman snapped. “Cans of process, that’s what we’ve got. Via! I know and everybody at the House knows that they’re bringing in crunchers and that they’re taking heart fillets out of duopods—all the good stuff, just like always. But what do they send
me
back with? Process! Compressed protein. Compressed flotsam! One of these days a load of boys from the House is going to come see your buddies, and they’re going to wish they’d changed their ways before.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the tanker without emphasis. “I’d say the crew at Six would be easier folks to talk to than to threaten. True of a lot of people, of course. Been reminding myself of that for going on twenty years.”

“You see how it is,” said Buckalew. He waved—Slade cringed and the truck rasped—toward the tall outline of the House on the horizon. “I’m in enough trouble, coming back with nothing but turtle cop. If I drop you at Service, they’ll be sure I off-loaded anything worth eating there too. You see.”

“They will,” the tanker repeated. He flexed his fingers, one hand against the other. “Well, I guess I’ll see pretty soon.”

“Come on, Bucky,” crackled the voice through the dash speaker. There was a rush of static or laughter. The voice then continued, “We know it’s you, but come on up where we can watch.”

The Houseman was shivering. The truck hovered at idle, millimeters off the ground. Its cab was pointed at the closed gate in the three-meter wall.

Buckalew touched the key of the microphone/speaker, a bolt-on set not integral with the vehicle. “Master Hensen,” Buckalew said, “you know I’m not . . . could you maybe let me in by the gate this once? You know I don’t. . . .”

Buckalew let his thumb slip from the key. The speaker roared, “Get your butt up here, goon, or we’ll come and find you!”

“They make you jump the wall to get in?” Slade asked.

Vehicles built for use on Tethys normally had enough extra fan capacity to fly without depending on ground effect, the bubble of air trapped between the ground and the vehicle’s skirts. Otherwise they could not be driven over Tethys’ omnipresent seas without the likelihood of disastrous attack by the larger predators. The supply truck was heavily laden, however. The ride from Station Six had made it clear that the Assistant Steward did not have the greater skills needed to safely lift the truck from its cushion.

“Well . . .” muttered Buckalew.

“Via, man,” Slade said, speaking the obvious. “You’ll kill us both if you try that!”

Buckalew nodded miserably as he fed power to the fans. “I know,” he said. “I’ve been buying my way off these runs till today.” The truck took a tentative hop and yawed its left front into the gravel.

Slade closed the throttles. His hand gripped the knobs and slid them back as if the Houseman were not trying to fight the pressure. “Get out,” Slade said. His voice was thick and irregular, like bubbles boiling through tar.

“Come
on,
Bucky, we’re
waiting
for you,” the speaker called.

“W-what?” Buckalew whimpered.

“Get
out
!
”
Slade repeated. “I’m taking this mother in!”

The tanker reached past Buckalew for the door, unlatched it, and thrust the Houseman out of the cab. Slade moved his own big body under the controls. The speaker started to make another demand. Slade’s right forearm crumpled the box into hissing somnolence.