Voyage Across the Stars (31 page)

As Danny stepped into the loop, he smiled at Subiyaga. The specialist’s brief conversation with his master was easy enough to guess, though Pritchard had heard neither end of it. Subiyaga let the unit run its pre-programmed settings without result. Then he began to punch additional commands into the cabinet.

Pritchard watched the apparatus with professional interest. The unit was considerably bulkier than the best of Hammer’s similar equipment, but it appeared to be fully as capable once it was set up. The subject within the ground loop was a dancing outline on the screen. A line swept up the image, then down again, for as long as it took the cabinet to run its program. The color of the sweep varied according to the element which was to be detected on a given pass.

Danny had deliberately worn a suit scintillant with fine wire to determine how sensitive the apparatus might be. The threads of stabilized aluminum remained on screen as an orange glow across his image after one of the sweeps. The circuitry of his stylus, his mastoid implant, and the heavy remote unit at his belt, were separate blotches. Their greenish tinge on the screen reflected the close mixture of metals within the electronic mechanisms.

Nowhere on the screen was there evidence of iridium; or significant amounts of iron; or a cylindrical blur of metal deposited to mirror a glass weapons-tube.

Subiyaga ignored Pritchard’s stylus. “Mark,” he said, so that his master could hear the details. “Sir, what is this, please?” The specialist pointed to a blotch on the screen, but his eyes were on the back of Pritchard’s jaw which the blotch indicated.

“That’s an implanted radio link,” the ex-mercenary replied. He tapped the spot with his forefinger. “Keyed to a base unit, it’s very useful. On Tethys, of course—” the smile became momentarily carnivorous— “and without the Regiment, it serves no function. Except to fill the hole cut in the bone to hold it.”

“And—” the specialist began, his finger sliding to the lower blotch.

“And this is a remote unit that
does
function on Tethys,” Pritchard said, almost anticipating the question. He spoke with the cool good-nature he generally maintained around things wearing crimson. “It’s linked to the Port, where a message capsule is already cleared for Friesland. Colonel Hammer wished to be informed immediately if anything untoward occurred during today’s deliberations.”

He turned. The clothing Pritchard now wore was nothing like the battle-dress he had doffed for good, two years before. No one could look at him at that moment, however, and doubt his military background. “Do you object to Colonel Hammer having that full report?”

“Mark,” said Subiyaga, clearing his link.

The man who met Danny’s eyes from the van across the courtyard spoke briefly, sharply.

“No, Mister Pritchard,” said the specialist to the ex-soldier’s back. “We have no objection. You may enter the Hall, sir.”

“I appreciate your courtesy,” said Pritchard as he faced the specialist again. Danny’s eyes swept like gunsights across the retainers, noting their stance, their alertness; where they set or carried the gun cases which were their badges and power. “And in thanking you,” Pritchard went on, “I speak for Colonel Hammer.”

Pritchard strode toward the massive doors of the Hall. The Councilors and attendants whom the delay had forced to queue now began passing through the checkpoint as well.

Councilor Dyson stared at the empty doorway for some seconds after Hammer’s man had passed through it.

“Mother!” said Edward Slade when he saw how Marilee was dressed. “It’s—you know you can’t wear blue, they’ll say you look like a servant!”

His mother snorted. Teddy blushed at the patent absurdity of what he had just said.

Marilee’s garment flowed from a loose-fitting stasis to follow its wearer’s movements with its own slow grace. The garment’s color was indeed blue, Slade Blue, but pulses moved up it with the inexorable polish of color in heat-treated steel. The pulses did not, however, so much change the color of the fabric as the saturation of that color. Marilee could no more have been mistaken for a servant than Slade House could have been mistaken for a mining station.

“Besides,” the woman said, amplifying the rebuke she had not needed to voice, “there won’t be any servants with us. Though—” a wrinkle flitted across her face as she recalled— “I did send two Housemen with Danny since he wanted to enter the Hall early. I suppose they may stay.”

“Mother,” the youth repeated, this time in irritation rather than surprise.

Teddy himself was a stiff ensemble in black and white. From his outfit, he might have stepped from a subordinate position in Late-Nineteenth Century diplomacy. Housemen in fresh livery glanced from one to another behind the youth, wondering how Marilee’s statement would affect them. “I realize how you must feel,” Teddy said without even considering whether his words had meaning or were merely sounds, “but we mustn’t give in to frustration. We’re Slades, and even if we’re beaten we mustn’t slink away into a corner. That is, I—”

Teddy’s breath caught and strangled the next words in his throat.

That was by no means soon enough, but it halted the arm Marilee had raised to slap her son. The tall woman’s face was white with blotches as the muscles drew back over her bones, “Will you say I am no Slade,
boy?”
she whispered. Her right arm slipped forward so that the fingers of her left hand could knead some of the tension out of it. “I was a Slade before you were conceived, Edward. Don’t you ever forget it.
Ever.”

She looked back at the servants. “Get out of here!” she shouted.

The Housemen scattered down the corridor. There were more of them than Marilee had realized, at least a dozen.

“Edward, come in here for a moment,” the woman said. Her voice trembled around expended emotion. Mother and son had been standing near the door to the Trophy Room. Now she opened the door and waved the nervous youth within.

The corridor had skylights and, along the baseboards, glow-strips. The Trophy Room’s great window was vivid with ambient light and the sun reflected from the facade of the Hall. Marilee could have chosen to polarize the glazed expanse, but she did not. The light bathed her, and the warmth massaged the shuddering from her muscles.

Marilee looked at her son. He braced himself defiantly, but she was no longer angry. She had assumed that Teddy did not know how soon he was going to die, to be killed like his father. Now Marilee realized that the youth was not a fool and not too young to recognize that Beverly Dyson had made murder an instrument of policy. Edward was keeping up the appearances of the world in which his father had raised him to believe. The youth did so for the same reason that a drowning man finally breathes the water that will kill him: there is nothing else to do.

“Edward,” Marilee said slowly, “I decided—about the Housemen—when we were discussing who we should put at the checkpoint to make sure that everyone was checked even if they wore red.”

Her son nodded. He was relieved but still uncertain about his mother’s change of tone. “Coon Blegan,” he said.

“Yes, Coon,” Marilee agreed. “Because there was no other member of this House we could really trust with that duty.”

The woman sighed and put a hand on her son’s clasped hands. “Something went wrong, Edward,” she said. “Somewhere along the line. I think my husband would have been good for Tethys if he had been allowed to be. But not for Slade House.”

Her voice rose. “Three times as many servants here as when I was married, and only one holdover that we can trust with our lives. That shouldn’t be. All the bowing and sharp dress in the world doesn’t make up for that, does it?”

Teddy squeezed his mother’s hand. He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Mother,” he said. He was neither willing nor fully able to state the subject of his apology. “We’ll have to do something about the Housemen. As soon as we—can.” It would not be their House after the Council met, as surely as the seas washed the shores. “But for now, I think we had best get to the Hall. We are Slades.”

They walked formally, arm in arm, the few steps to the door. Edward then preceded his mother down the narrow, tightly-coiled staircase. His head was high, and his pace was as measured as if he had scores of attendants.

Marilee was close to tears, though there was nothing in her quizzical expression to suggest that. Perhaps if he ran? Fled Tethys, became—became a mercenary soldier, with his uncle easing his way in that alien culture, watching over him. And then in a few years, when it was safe to come home—

Don was right. It would never again be safe on Tethys.

As her feet patted against the stair treads, Marilee’s face drew itself into a smile as taut as a tetanic rictus. Each tap of sole on stone put her and the House and the planet twenty centimeters closer to disaster. She should have hired the Slammers, curse the expense in all its meanings.

Dear Lord, she should not have ordered away Don Slade. Not now.

And not twenty years before, either.

The doors of the Hall were four meters high and proof against more than storms when they were closed and locked from the inside. The trunions on which they swung inward ran in trackways grooved into the base slab. Open, the doors gaped as wide as they rose in the concrete facade. For the symmetry of the occasion, the leaves were fully open now; but a solid line of Dyson retainers across the threshold made sure that none of those entering failed to go through the security check first.

Two of the red-clad men had stepped aside with perfunctory smiles. Councilor Roosevelt, his wife, and fourteen assorted members of his family and staff were passing into the Hall. The youngest child made a curious attempt to pat a crimson trouser leg. His nurse snatched him back immediately. The adults of the entourage preferred to act as if the guards did not exist.

At least that rascal Dyson had shown the decency to leave his squad unarmed. The remainder—almost fifty—of his men in the courtyard flaunted their cased guns with a particular relish this afternoon. The deliberations of the Council would be sealed by custom against interference; but there was only the single exit from the Hall.

“Passage, gentlemen,” said a voice from within the door alcove. The guards were bored and unprepared for someone who wanted to leave at this moment.

“I said,” snarled Danny Pritchard, “get your butts out of the way, turtleheads!”

The line clotted as Dyson’s men wheeled to face the ex-mercenary. Those in the queue waiting to be checked began craning their necks to see what had happened. The music tangled to a momentary halt before the leader of the musicians snapped his group back to attention with a nervous look toward Beverly Dyson. The musicians were supposed to cover, not join, awkward incidents of this sort.

Danny Pritchard stood with a sneer and his fists on his hip bones. He was not a scarred tough like many of the men he now faced; but he was a commander glaring at men who knew they were only vessels of power. The guards would be discarded without hesitation if they overstepped bounds of which they were only hazily aware.

“Subiyaga! Via!” shouted the leader of the squad on the threshold. Subiyaga was not even in the blurred chain of command, but he was the only one present with a link to the source of power. “Are we supposed to let people out?”

“Blood, McKinney!” Subiyaga said. “Are you crazy? Of course they can get out. What do you think you’re doing?”

“Let him go! Let him go!” the shaken squad leader said. His men were already reacting like dollops of a fruit hit by a projectile. They were not there to alienate Councilors whom Dyson wished for the time to coddle.

Danny Pritchard strolled out with a nod toward the specialist. The guards at the detection cabinet had fumbled with their cases during the tension. It was only now, however, that they saw who the source of the incident had been.

“Hey!” called Ahwas, the leader of that armed group. “Mister! You got to go through the loop again before you go back inside!”

The man from Friesland grinned broadly. “I hear you talking,” he said. He continued to walk toward the House from which he had come so recently.

Subiyaga watched him walk away. The specialist’s face was troubled, but he could not be quite certain of what he saw.

The courtyard was not particularly hot. The bright sun which had been a caress in the Trophy Room was here a slap in the face. Perhaps that was because of the way the light danced with such frequency from crimson livery. There were numerous groups led by Councilors at one stage or another of their progress to the Hall. Even so, Dyson’s retainers seemed omnipresent. The man himself stood on his van ten meters away, as if he were on a reviewing stand.

Marilee paused in the doorway. Behind the Slades, Councilor Picolo squeaked as her way was blocked by her hostess and son. Marilee murmured an apology to her, one of only two women who were Council members in their own right. As Marilee did so, she drew her son into the shade of one of the armored drones flanking the doorway. She needed to take stock.

“Mistress, I was told to escort you into the Hall,” said the man who had waited patiently beside the same drone. “Told by Mister Pritchard.”

His livery had blended well enough with the blue shade; and until he spoke he had been as motionless as the 10 cm gun above him. For that matter, Don Slade was no longer the flamboyant hell-raiser who had left Tethys twenty years before. Like the gun-drone, he was scarred and stolid now; but not to be ignored.

“You fool, you
mustn’t
be here!” the woman said in a voice that was as much a curse as a whisper.

“Mistress,” said the big man calmly. “I’m going inside as your escort. Nothing you say will have any effect except to call attention to—us.”

“Mother, he
should
go,” interjected Edward. “You said we had no one except Coon we could trust. Well, this man, this Holt, proved yesterday that he wasn’t afraid of Dyson or Dyson’s men. Didn’t he?”

“T—,” Marilee began. Then, “Edward, there are things you can’t . . .” She paused again when she realized that this was neither the time nor the place to explain. Anyway, the explanation would not matter in any real sense.