Voyage Across the Stars (35 page)

Many of the spectators in the Hall were only now beginning to leave. Shock and fright had kept them hunched behind partitions that would have been of no more account than farts in whirlwind, had the fighting really rolled their way. Now these folk ducked back out of the aisle or scudded ahead of Slade’s progress with fearful looks behind them.

Home? Blood and Martyrs! But that would pass, and Don Slade was home indeed.

“I was getting ready to come look for you,” said Danny Pritchard. The ex-mercenary lounged again beside the gun of his fighting vehicle. This time it was parked beside the shattered doors to the Hall, as still as it had been when day broke. “Marilee said you’d be along, though, so I figured I could wait.”

He slid off the drone. “Here,” he said, holding out one of the submachine guns gathered from Dyson’s thugs. “You might want this.”

Slade took the weapon, checking the load and safety by instinct. He gazed around the courtyard. The pool of orange flames and bubbling smoke took a moment to connect with Dyson’s van. There didn’t appear to have been the carnage he had feared and expected, though.

There was a crowd of what had surely been Dyson’s guards in a corner between the House and the enclosure wall. Most of them had lost their livery as well as their weapons for some reason. Fishermen were pointing guns at their captives from the ground and from the roofs of the supply trucks. There would probably be accidents, but Slade was not disposed to worry about the despondent liverymen at this moment.

Chesson, atop one of the trucks, waved and shouted when Slade appeared from the building. “We got ’em, Soldier,” he called gleefully.

“Just a little longer,” the tanker shouted back. “By the Lord, it won’t be forgotten.”

“You know, Danny,” Slade said to his companion, “I don’t think I want this after all. Not right now.” He handed back the gun he was holding. A stream of people was passing across the courtyard from the Hall, but only Council members seemed to be entering the House. Marilee had matters under control there already.

“Let’s go talk to some people about the Slade Estate,” said the big man mildly. “And about Tethys, I do suppose.”

Together, the ex-mercenaries began walking toward the House. Danny Pritchard still cradled the automatic weapon.

“Everyone’s gone upstairs, D-don,” said Marilee from the bottom of the staircase. The name had come so smoothly from her memory that she stumbled when she paused to consider what she was saying.

Slade smiled. “I thought at least a few of the Councilors’d figure the going was good,” he said. “Marilee.”

“They may be afraid of what you’ve got to say,” noted Danny Pritchard from the political background which had absorbed him since Hammer took Friesland. “But they’re going to be a lot more afraid of not being there when you say it.”

He chuckled. In a different persona he added, “Want some company while you talk?” Pritchard did not have to gesture with the gun to make his meaning clear.

Slade punched him gently on the arm. “Hey,” the big man said, “that’s
my
line. I think—” He paused, then went on. “Upstairs I’ve got to handle myself. I’m the guy who’s going to live here, right?”

Pritchard grinned. “Via, you’re learning,” he said approvingly. “Come back to Friesland and I’ll find you a job in Admin. Hang in there, snake. I’m going to organize some of those people—” he gestured in the general direction of the hidden prisoners— “into a clean-up crew. Crispy critters are likely to offend the tender sensibilities of your peers.”

Whistling, Hammer’s heir strolled back toward the courtyard. Slade watched him for a moment. Then the big man cleared his throat and offered his crooked elbow to Marilee. “Shall we?” he said.

The woman’s mouth quirked in a fashion that could have broadened into a smile. “The stairs are a little tight, aren’t they?”

“Via, has it been so long?” Slade said with a chuckle that loosened his muscles and his taut, turbid mind. “Come on, my dear.” His arm looped out to circle Marilee’s waist. It was, he thought as they climbed in step made awkward by the wedgeshaped treads, a very long time. And it felt as good now as ever it had.

Every Council member was standing, though there were seats enough in the Trophy Room for at least half of them.

The room’s width between the trophy wall and the shot-out window was enough to keep the gathering from being cramped. No one wanted to be in the front, however. As a result, the Councilors were strung out along the window transom as if awaiting a firing party. Their faces bore out that suggestion, Slade thought as he strode to the center of the room.

“All right, now everybody move closer,” Slade said. He raised his voice of necessity but avoided harsh modulations. “We’re going to talk like human beings, that’s all.”

He had done this job before, many times before. Every time his troops set up in a populated area, the local leaders had to be called together. Frightened; the timid ones sure they were about to be shot, the smart ones aware that they
could
be shot at the mercenary’s whim, whatever might be the orders of a distant headquarters. These faces were the same, though Slade recognized at least a dozen of them from his childhood.

The Councilors moved in from either end. Most of them shuffled, but two or three stepped firmly and kept their shoulders squared. Jose Hauksbee was one—still short, still pudgy, but willing to meet Slade’s eyes. Dyson had not chosen a sycophant, then, to move his triumph but rather a true ally or a foe, now broken to obedience.

“I returned from fighting,” the big tanker said as sullen faces waited in a shallow arc around him. When he swayed, he could feel the skull of the knife-jaw at his shoulders and the warmth of Marilee beside him again. “What happened today I regret, it’s not what I came home to do. I didn’t come back to run the Slade Estate, either.”

He paused and emphasized his words by staring at the men and women around him. “That was for my brother,” he went on, “and it’ll be for his son . . . but right now, because you’ve decided Edward should have a guardian for the next two years, I think it might be a good idea it you appointed me.”

There was a hiss of conversation with one clear voice wondering, “Where
is
the boy, then?”

“I move,” cried a Councilor whom Slade did not recognize, “that Donald Slade be confirmed by acclamation as Councilor and heir of his father in accordance with evidence presented at our last meeting.” The man who spoke was old and slender with dissipation rather than health. His teeth were perfect. Only the way his face moved when he grinned suggested they were rotten.

“No!” Don Slade was shouting. Marilee’s fingers were tight on his left arm. What he heard was a nightmare, a demon repeating words that Slade himself had spoken only in his own mind, over and over as he paced through the courtyard he had won by force of arms. “No, I don’t—say that. Guardian for my nephew Edward, Councilor and heir of the Slade Estate. To his majority. That, Via, only that.”

“So moved,” said Councilor Hauksbee, “by acclamation.” He continued to meet Slade’s eyes.

There was a rattle of agreement and clapping, even some cheers. If there had been a formal second, it was lost in the noise . . . as the problem would be lost in the formal record.

“One other thing,” said Slade, raising his voice over the babble that followed the action. “There’s some problems at the Port. If you’ll give me six months and a free hand, there won’t be problems anymore.”

“So moved!” cried the Councilor who had earlier tried to make Slade Councilor in his own right.

“Wait a minute!” the big man added as concern again blanked the faces of many of those around him. “The Port is an enclave, not part of the Slade Estate. Nothing’s changing except that
everybody’s
goods are going to be moving through again without screwing around.” Slade raised his hands to keep the silence while his words marshalled themselves. “I don’t want what you have. I don’t even want what Dyson has. His estate will pass by law, wherever. But I’m Don Slade, people. What
I
have, I hold!”

The hush that followed was broken by Hauksbee’s dry voice saying, “I second the motion of Councilor Gardiner.”

The rattle of agreement which followed was again whole-hearted.

Slade put his arm around the woman beside him. “That’s all I have to say,” he remarked. The relief and elation he felt softened his voice. “I suppose whatever arrangements were planned for after the meeting are still on.”

There were a half dozen cheers. Councilors surged forward to clasp the hand of the man from whom they had edged in terror moments before. Through the chorus of flattery and congratulation, Slade alone really noticed what Councilor Hauksbee was shouting. “Wait a minute!” the tanker roared. He raised his hands again. “Wait a minute!”

Hauksbee had not stepped forward, though he had been the nearest to Slade of the Councilors when the meeting began. With the background noise low enough for everyone now to hear him, Hauksbee said, “What happens to Dyson, Councilor Slade? What happens to the people who supported him? I was nominating him as guardian, you know.”

And by the Lord! Dyson hadn’t picked a coward for that task, Slade thought. Aloud the big man said, “Bev goes into exile. He can’t be here and me be safe, it’s that simple. Or any of you safe either.”

Slade glanced sternly around the gathering. “Most of the servants he’d gathered up, they’ll go too. Lot of them aren’t from Tethys to begin with, and we sure as hell don’t need them around. For the rest—”

There was a collective intake of breath from the Council. Even Hauksbee swallowed as he tried not to look away from the tanker.

“For the rest, I’m not asking questions and I’m not listening to tales. We’ve all done things in our past we don’t want to be reminded of. Forget about—Via, the past twenty years on Tethys, if you like. I will.”

“Why of course—” and “I always said the Slades—” were the only phrases the tanker could hear clearly in the sycophantic chorus. Hauksbee pursed his lips and nodded acceptance, not joy.

“Jose, all of you!” Slade said, using his voice to hammer its own path of silence. Men were grasping his hands. He did not snatch them away, but the slighter fingers fell away from Slade’s scarred, powerful ones as he spoke.

“I’m not a saint,” Slade went on in the new silence. “I’ve done terrible things.” He swallowed.

Only a few of the faces turned toward Slade understood the sort of things he meant. The profession of slaughter, like others, has its arcana. No one could doubt Slade’s sincerity when he went on. “I don’t need to lie, people. If somebody’s going to be shot, I’ll tell you. Bev isn’t, and neither are his boys.”

There was another roar and surge of agreement. This time Slade responded to every hand, every enthusiastic greeting with the comment, “I appreciate that. You’ll want to get down to your people right away and explain that the trouble’s over.”

He himself was walking slowly toward the door. Marilee paced just ahead of the tanker to boost Councilors to escape velocity with her own handshake and grim smile.
She
had not promised to forget.

Councilor Hauksbee was the last. “I owe you an apology, Mister Slade,” the pudgy man said. He extended his hand but did not snatch at Slade’s the way so many others had done.

“It was Don when we were kids, Jose,” Slade said with a smile. They had not been friends, but each boy for his own reasons had a circle of enemies which often overlapped. “And you needn’t apologize for honesty. Not anymore.”

The handshake was a little more than formal. The trio poised by the door out of the room. “Not for being honest,” Hauksbee said, “but for assummg you weren’t. I—just wanted to be sure of the rules.”

Slade nodded. His hand was now touching Marilee’s again. “There’s an Alayan ship in orbit,” he said to Hauksbee. “The—Bev and the rest, they’ll go aboard. Some may be released on Friesland, if Danny and the Colonel think they’d be useful. Most’ll stay with the Alayans for—use.” The tanker cleared his throat. How in the
hell
had the Alayans known there would be a cargo for them on Tethys? “They won’t be mistreated, but they won’t leave the ship.”

“We’ll talk later,” Hauksbee said as he stepped through the door. When he was already out of sight of the anteroom, he called back, “I’m glad you’ve come home, Don.”

“Are
you
glad, Don?” Marilee asked coolly. She stepped to the door to close it. She did not move back into his waiting arms.

“I came home because I wanted to be on Tethys,” Slade said. He spoke as he would have walked through a minefield, slowly and with the greatest care. “For various reasons. And if you mean ‘glad I came just now’—yeah, I suppose I am. Somebody needed to put things straight. I guess it’s worked out as well as anybody was going to make it.”

“Guns do make it easier to run things, don’t they?” the woman said in the same brittle tone. She began to walk back along the trophy wall, skirting the man as she passed him.

“Listen, curse it!” Slade said. He paced behind the woman, fists clenched, the image of a carnivore at heel. “The guns were there before I was born. The only difference now is there’s a
man
behind them again. I’m not going to melt down those gun-trucks, but they’ll stay parked till they rust away for anything I do in the next two years.”

Marilee spun. “Can I believe that?” she snapped. Her blue gown had not torn in the fighting, but there was a bruise showing already on her left cheekbone.

“Anything we’ve got left is an administrative problem,” Slade said quietly. “I’m not real good at those, but I know how to recognize people who are. You don’t use guns to solve admin problems.”

He took a deep breath that trembled with the emotion he was trying to keep out of his voice. “But there’s gun problems too, Marilee. Don’t ever forget it. And don’t blame me for seeing that there are.”

She moved slightly, away from the wall. He saw the trophy that her body had screened as they walked back from the door. The argus larva was no more than the length of Slade’s adult arm, but its spines still bristled with the vicious intensity of life. Old Man Slade had replaced each one of those which the boy’s bare hands had shattered.