Back | Next
Contents

CALICHEMAN

Ran Colville drew in a breath whose cool humidity felt good in his lungs. On Calicheman Trident Starlines docked at Longleat, a broad canal served along both sides by railways. Starship landings generated huge quantities of steam, most of which recondensed into droplets before the gangplanks lowered.

From the Empress's pilotry data, society on Calicheman was similar to that of Ohio in the 1820s. It was a less uniform culture than many. Not surprisingly, its worst—and most extreme—aspects were concentrated in the district surrounding the starport.

A train, aided by scores of cabs and hire cars, had carried off those of the Empress's passengers who disembarked—for good or just to stretch their legs. Calicheman's main export, beef from the feral cattle which roamed all three of the main continents, was coming aboard by the carload from the broad—2-meter—gauge trains drawn up alongside the dock.

The beef would fill what had been the Third Class spaces, now refrigerated. The cargoes were comparable from a commercial viewpoint; on a bad day, Ran might have said that the connection was closer than that.

But this was a very good day, as sunny as Ran's disposition, and so far as he could tell, he was off duty now. He'd already freed Mohacks and Babanguida. Now he touched his transceiver to the lower end of the First Class gangplank and said, "Colville to Holly. Want to see what's happening on Calicheman, Wanda? Over."

"A lot of cows are turning grass into methane, unless the place has changed in the past three weeks," replied Wanda's voice, thinned by the transmission channel. She didn't need to cue Bridge, because the AI routed the response by default to the initial caller. "I'd take you around, but I've got deck watch. Sorry. Over."

A train energized its bearings and clanked upward from the rails. It chuffed forward the length of one car. Then it settled with a similar clang and resumed offloading its pallets.

"This is the Commander's watch," Ran said in puzzlement "Over."

"He's got something hush-hush at the embassy," Wanda explained. After a pause, she added, "The Brasil didn't touch down here either, you know. It looks as though she, well . . . But go enjoy yourself. Calicheman's not a bad place, so long as you mind your own business. The locals get pretty touchy about individual rights, though. Over."

"I've got no problem with that," Ran said. "Well, maybe you can look me up when you get free. Colville out."

Wanda snorted. "I'm not into threesomes," she said. "Holly out."

Ran didn't have problems with much of anything, not since Hobilo. The shadow of his father's past had been lifted—burned away as though by the metal-charged flame of Chick Colville's weapon. Seeing the actual place didn't make the events less horrible, but it proved they were over . . . as they had never been over for Ran's father, or for Ran until that moment of catharsis.

The taxi rank was empty, but a cab returning from Tidal had turned into the approach road. The noise of machinery chuckling as it shifted beef aboard the Empress of Earth seemed thin in the breeze and open spaces, but it completely covered the sound of two late-leaving passengers until they fell into step with Ran.

He turned in startlement. "Good morning, Lieutenant Colville," said Franz Streseman. The young Grantholmer held two overnight cases in his left hand. "May I present my friend Miss Tranh van Oanh? Or have you met?"

"Formally only," Ran said, "and barely that. Very glad to make your acquaintance, ma'am."

He bowed to Oanh. The girl looked like a lute string tuned a key above normal, but the problem wasn't between her and Franz. They'd been holding hands until Ran turned.

"Would you care to share a cab into Tidal, sir?" Franz offered.

"If you'll call me 'Ran' instead of 'sir,'" Ran said, and he opened the taxi's door for the young couple.

* * *

The prairies of Calicheman were covered with grasses close enough to those of Earth that some botanists claimed to have cross-bred the strains. These claims were disputed by others. Now that panspermia was no longer a hypothesis but simple observation, nobody familiar with the vast adaptability of plant species denied that it was theoretically possible.

The road from Longleat to Tidal, the largest of the nearby towns, was undermaintained, and quite a lot of the planetary traffic was off-road entirely. Local vehicles were designed for the prevailing conditions.

This cab, driven by a dour woman who carried her pistol in a cross-draw holster, rode high over large wheels. The vehicle gave the three passengers in back a good look at the rolling terrain of grasses, flowering shrubs, and small trees—not stunted, but saplings whose lifespan was limited by frequent prairie fires. From a non-specialist's standpoint, the landscape could have been the next panel from the hologram of the North American Midwest in Ran's cabin. Only the profusion of animal life provided an obvious difference.

Tidal was five kilometers away from the port. The trip was a panorama of brindled cattle, mixed in approximately equal numbers with a score of native herbivores.

Halfway along the jolting, swaying journey, Oanh leaned forward to look past Franz toward the Trident officer. "Are there proper docking facilities on Szgrane, sir?" she asked.

"They haven't docked anything our size," Ran said, stifling a wince at being called "sir" as if he was the girl's grandfather. "But then, neither had Grantholm until the Empress touched down on her maiden voyage."

He mentally reviewed the pilotry data. "They've got four modern tugs," he went on. "That's enough if they don't mind us digging a bit of a hole with our own motors at three-quarters power, which Trident will pay to repair."

"A backwater," Franz said, "but the port averages three landings a day. I've been there."

"No doubt a very suitable place from which to ferry all the soldiers returning to Grantholm to kill my compatriots," Oanh said. Her tone was noticeably cooler by the end of the comment than it had been at the beginning.

"Szgrane has an established trade with Grantholm," Ran said carefully, staring out the window so that he wouldn't have to notice the expressions on the faces of the young couple beside him. "But there's absolutely no possibility that the authorities on Szgrane would permit any insult to our Nevasan passengers. They're very—punctilious about their honor, the Szgranians."

The highway, such as it was, paralleled the railroad tracks. A twelve-car train howled by in the opposite direction, carrying more beef toward the Empress at 150 kph. Ran's teeth grated, and portions of the taxi moaned.

Railways on Calicheman used ultrasonics to clear the way ahead of them. The speed at which the trains sailed over their tracks on magnetic runners meant that the pulses had to be of high enough amplitude to ring harmonics from any object in the same county.

On many planets there would be laws to prevent the railways from such an obvious hazard to public health. On Calicheman—at least near the starport—a cowboy being hammered by ultrasonics was likely to take a shot at the train—but then, the train driver might well shoot back. Other lands, other customs.

Franz leaned forward and said to the driver, "Ah, can you drop us at the best hotel in Tidal, please?"

Til drop you in the square," the driver replied, "and you can walk to any damn hotel you please."

Ran sighed. He was as interested in personal freedom as the next fellow, but he couldn't understand people who felt that it was demeaning to do what somebody else paid you to do. That attitude got in the way of doing the best job possible . . . and Ran Colville didn't have any use for people who did less than the best job possible.

It was possible that the taxi driver was some sort of aberration. More likely, she was a foretaste of the hotel staff, waiters, clerks, and everydamnbody else he'd have to deal with in Tidal.

It was still a beautiful day.

Tidal wasn't on any body of water, which was a pity. Even a lake would have been useful to flush the effluvium of the slaughterhouses at the edge of town. Earthmoving equipment dug trenches to replace those already filled with stinking blood and offal. Flies and the native equivalents formed clouds that looked thick enough to walk on. Layers of quicklime, and the dirt bulldozed onto the trenches when evaporation had shrunk and congealed their contents, did little to discourage the insects.

"This is—hideous!" Oanh said.

"Amazing," Franz echoed in scarcely less pejorative tones.

"This is certainly the home of the rugged individual," Ran said mildly. "Nobody's asking us to live here, of course."

Though Calicheman was a beautiful place in its own stark fashion. Only the human colonists gave Ran pause. Not the first time he'd thought that about one planet or another.

Tidal was built in a melange of styles, most of them garish. High walls concealed and protected the homes of the wealthy, and virtually everyone Ran noticed on the streets was armed. There were no sidewalks, though paved plazas fronted some businesses.

The taxi pulled up hard enough to make the chassis sway on its springs. "Forty-two dollars," the driver said, tapping the sign on her reader.

"I'll get it," Franz said, extending a credit chip.

"Double if it's drawn on an off-planet bank," the driver added. She'd unholstered her long-barreled pistol. It lay on her lap, not pointed anywhere in particular but a blunt warning.

"I'll get it," Ran said mildly. "My credit's through the local Trident office."

He fed his chip into the reader, his face without expression. Oanh got down from the car's high body. Franz tugged their overnight cases from under the seat.

Oanh screamed. Two big men wearing bright garments beneath rough-out leather vests and chaps had the girl by the elbows. They tossed her into the back of a dosed car and leaped in behind her.

Ran grabbed the taxi driver's pistol. "Hey!" she bellowed as she caught the barrel before he could aim. The kidnap vehicle accelerated away with all four wheels squealing.

"I'll buy the damned thing!" Ran shouted.

"Like hell!" the driver shouted back. She tried to bite his hand.

Ran let go of the gun. It was too late for that. The other vehicle had vanished into the sparse traffic. He wasn't sure he'd have fired anyway. He'd never been much use with handguns, and Oanh has likely to be injured in the crash even if he'd managed to shoot out a tire.

Franz Streseman was shouting for the police. Ran didn't bother. The Empress's pilotry information had made it clearthat self-help was the only help there was on Calicheman. Locals were watching the event with various levels of amusement.

A public telephone, armored like a tank, stood a few meters away. Ran retrieved his credit chip from the taximeter, ran to the phone, and punched TRIDENT on the keypad. The response was strikingly fast.

"Bridge," announced the Empress's AI through the flat-plate speaker.

"Emergency," Ran said. "Deck officer. Over."

The speaker rattled. "Holly, over," it said tensely.

"Wanda, a Trident passenger has got a problem," Ran explained, "and we're going to solve it."

Ran made a series of curt statements and requests. One thing he didn't say, because he didn't want it on record, and because he didn't know how Franz Streseman, distraught at his elbow now, would react.

Ran hadn't recognized the actual kidnappers. But he was quite certain that the face glaring from the back of the kidnap vehicle was that of Gerd von Pohlitz.

* * *

Wanda Holly was alone in the rental car. Ran waved her over to the front of Tidal's Municipal Building, a one-story structure with rammed-earth walls and a littered areaway. Twilight and neon from nearby establishments helped disguise the building's aura of filth.

"You got to understand," said the Town Marshal, a woman named Platt with gray hair in unattractive curls, "that just because a couple outsiders say there's a crime, that don't make it a crime."

"We understand you perfectly, madam," Franz Streseman said in a voice that could have struck sparks from steel. He started to get into the car.

"Just a minute, buddy," Platt snapped, thrusting her arm out in front of the young Grantholmer. If she'd done that to a local, she'd have been handed the limb back with the fingers missing, but she obviously figured it was safe to bully passengers from a luxury starship. They wouldn't make a scene.

Platt turned her attention to Wanda in the driver's seat. "What kind of weapons you got in there?" she demanded.

The deputy, a fat drunk named Boardman, with a billiard-ball scalp and dried vomit on his vest, watched the proceedings from behind an automatic shotgun. If he did start shooting, he was as likely to cut his superior in half as he was to do whatever passed for his intention, but that wouldn't help whoever else was around during the wild volley.

"Weapons?" Wanda said in open amazement. "Why, none. I'm just here to pick up a distressed passenger from my ship."

Platt bent to check the empty luggage spaces under the seats. Rental vehicles were built without frills like paneling and insulated bodies. This car obviously carried nothing but the Trident officer herself.

"Surely it's not illegal to be armed in Tidal, Marshal?" Ran asked.

Someone in a passing car jeered and threw a fruit skin at Platt. It slapped her pants leg. She didn't appear to notice. "Don't you be telling me what's against the law here, buddy!" she snarled. "We don't need Earthmen telling us what's what!"

She lowered her arm and backed away. Franz nodded curtly and climbed into the car. Ran followed, calling, "Our government will protest about this!"

"Fuck you outsiders!" Platt cried. "Just because some broad goes off for a good time with a couple local boys, you wanna make it a crime! Well, I'm not having you starting a shootout in my jurisdiction!"

Boardman, her deputy, belched. He'd been doing that regularly since Ran and Franz appeared to make their complaint. Tidal needed some sort of officialdom, however minor; the trouble was that in a society which prided itself so thoroughly on rugged individualism, the sort of folks willing to take municipal jobs were incapable of handling any job competently.

Wanda put the car in gear. It rode even more harshly than the taxi had. "What was that charade about?" she asked.

"Just that," Ran agreed. "A charade. If we didn't make a formal complaint like civilized people, they'd figure that we were going to behave like locals—and be ready for us when we did."

"They, in this case," Wanda said, "being a rancher named Humboldt who came here from Grantholm thirty years back. He's not in a big way of business, but he's got about a dozen hired hands at any given time."

Wanda looked like a nervous driver because her head and eyes were constantly in motion. Ran noticed that her hands and feet were steady on the controls, however, making only necessary corrections and those small ones. The car was headed back toward Longleat and the Empress.

"How do you know this?" Franz demanded. The front seat was wide enough for three slim people, but there was nothing for him to hold onto. The slick fabric cover had him sliding into one officer, then the other.

"She used Bridge to penetrate the municipal data banks," Ran explained. "It was long odds they'd cleared the business with their tame law, just to avoid accidents."

"Nope," said Wanda with a smile. "It was easier than that. The kidnappers called her father, the minister, and I back-traced the call to the Humboldt ranch. Then I checked the records office."

Ran grimaced. "How did Lin react?" he asked. "I suppose they want him to turn over all his data to get his daughter back."

"Probably," Wanda agreed, "but I didn't let the call through. Bridge'll keep noting a fault until somebody removes the block I put on."

She turned and leaned forward to be able to catch Ran's eyes. "This is going to be a real embarrassment if things don't work out," she added. "Though I don't suppose we'll have to worry about answering questions."

Ran nodded grimly.

Wanda pulled off the road as soon as she was beyond the slaughterhouses and their waste dumps, lethal pit-traps in the growing darkness. They continued cross-country at 30 kph, a moderate speed under any other circumstances.

The young Grantholmer's face was set in a hawklike expression in the instrument lights. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"Just out of the way," Ran explained. "We don't want too many people watching the rendezvous. Some of them might guess what was going on."

A great beast with wrinkled skin and tusks like shovels loomed up in the driving lights. Wanda wrenched the steering wheel hard, but the animal blatted and fled. The tuft of white hair on its tail wobbled like a flag in the beams' side-scatter.

"Ah—Franz?" Ran said. He barely avoided saying "boy" instead of using the youth's name. "You should maybe opt out of this one."

Streseman looked at him. "Of course not," he said crisply. "This is properly my affair, as a man, as a—as a lover, of course. You are the ones who are going beyond what could be expected of your duty."

"It's just possible Commander Kneale would feel that way," Wanda murmured. "He's not the sort to second-guess his people, though."

"What I mean, Franz . . ." Ran said. He rocked forward in his seat as Wanda braked to avoid a straggling line of cattle, their eyes flaring red in the headlights. "What I meant is, now that we know it's Grantholmers who've grabbed Oanh."

"You assumed that, surely?" the youth said coolly. "I've never claimed that all my fellow-countrymen are saints. We have thieves, have murderers; have kidnappers. All the more reason for me to wish to right this wrong."

"The people who did this," Ran continued deliberately, "are going to think of themselves as patriots. And so will a lot of people back on Grantholm if they learn about it."

Franz shrugged. "Stresemans have never been afraid to support the right," he said. "Even when it was unpopular." He was as matter-of-fact as if he'd been discussing the scarlet sunset.

Ran sighed. It must be nice to be so certain about right and wrong. "Were you able to find me a long gun?" he asked Wanda.

"Sorry," she said. "The armory only has pistols and submachine guns. But we'll be at close range, won't we?"

"Who knows?" Ran said. His palms were beginning to feel cold. Until now, he'd been too focused on each next step to worry. "Yeah, I suppose. Maybe a submachine gun, that'll be all right. But I'm no good with short guns."

"Your training was only with rifles?" Franz asked curiously. He seemed perfectly calm.

"There wasn't any training," Ran explained. "I'm from Bifrost. I was a hide hunter before I ran off on a tramp freighter."

He grimaced. "I hated it," he said. He laced his fingers together. "But at the margin of profit on a shagskin or even a sleen, I couldn't afford to miss. And with a rifle, I don't."

"I see," said the youth. He frowned. "How much farther do we drive, then?" he asked.

The sky began to flicker blue. Wanda stuck her head out her side window and craned her neck upward. "I think . . ." she said, "that we've arrived."

She stopped the car and took it out of gear. Even as she did so, Lifeboat 23 from the Empress of Earth coasted to a roaring halt beside the ground vehicle. The boat was only thirty meters long, but as it settled through the dusk it looked as huge as the starliner itself.

The sidehatch was open. Crewman First Class Babanguida stood in the hatchway, lighted by the glare of the magnetic motors reflecting from the grasses. He held a submachine gun in his right hand and, in his left, a rifle as long as those used on Bifrost to hunt the twelve-tonne shagskins.

"Our chariot awaits, gentlemen," said Wanda Holly as she unlatched her door. Then she added, "Boy, is there going to be hell to pay if we blow this one."

* * *

"Here," Wanda said as she handed a long, loose shirt to Franz Streseman. Mohacks, at the controls of the grounded lifeboat, and Babanguida already wore similar overgarments of shimmering fabric. "Put this on. Ran—"

She lifted another from the locker and tossed it to him.

"—here's one for you."

Ran took the shirt absently and laid it beside him. He was checking the sights—holographic, with a bead-in-ghost-ring backup—and mechanism of the rifle Babanguida had given him. It was semi-automatic, with a three-round magazine holding cartridges as long as his hand. The bore was about fifteen millimeters. There were no markings on the receiver and the cartridge headstamp, MN 93, didn't tell him a lot either.

"An insulating wrap?" Franz said doubtfully. "I'm not cold, and it's likely to tangle."

"That cost us a right good amount, sir," Babanguida said. "Thirty-two hundred creds for the gun, and fifty apiece for the shells. He only had twenty-three shells."

"It'll do," Ran muttered. "It isn't an army we're going up against."

"I told you not to buy arms locally," Wanda said sharply. "You're likely to have tipped off Humboldt and von Pohlitz."

Ran fumbled two chips from his pouch and set them on the deck beside him. "This ought to cover . . ." he said as he eased back the charging handle on the empty magazine.

The rifle was two meters long and weighed upwards of twenty kilograms. The complex muzzle brake would bring the recoil down to bearable levels, but the resulting backblast would rattle shingles for a block behind the shooter.

"Oh, I trust you for the money, sir," Babanguida said, though his black hand quickly covered the chips.

Ran snorted. "I don't trust I'll be alive come morning," he said.

The rifle felt good in Ran's hands. It felt just like the weapon he'd used for six years after his father died, to feed and clothe himself and his mother . . . until she died too, and the young hide hunter became a Cold Crewman on the unscheduled freighter Prester John.

"There's local and local, Ms. Holly," said Mohacks from the control chair. "We had some time—and the boat, since the Officer of the Deck had cleared us to take it out. So we looked up an old bastard in a lodge three hundred klicks up in the hills. When he feels like it, he guides folks as want to hunt land whales."

"He wouldn't give his mother the time of day," Babanguida added. "He's not gonna be calling around to see if anybody cares that a sailor bought a rifle."

"We figured," Mohacks said piously, "that if Mr. Colville felt comfortable with a cannon, then it was our job to get him a cannon."

"The reason we told my watch and left yours aboard the Empress," Ran said as he loaded the rifle's magazine, "is that Mohacks and Babanguida aren't going to check the regs before they make a move."

He grinned at his ratings. They grinned back.

"Of course," Ran added, "they probably think there's some money to be made out of this deal."

"I will of course see to it that those helping on this enterprise are properly compensated," Franz said stiffly.

Babanguida chuckled. "Don't you worry yourself, sir," he said. "We figure, when this is over, there's likely to be something laying around that the owners don't need."

"Mind," Mohacks added, "a suitable gratuity wouldn't be misplaced at the end of this—if you keep from getting your head blown off, sir."

"Streseman," Wanda said harshly, "get into your jacket. We'll be using passive infra-red goggles at the start. The insulating fabric will give us a lower thermal signature so that we'll be able to tell each other apart from the locals."

Ran quickly stood and pulled his own shirt over his white uniform. He didn't need the tic in Wanda's cheek or the unexpected sharpness of her tone to tell him that she was right on the edge. They all were, even the seemingly relaxed ratings.

"We don't have any information about the layout of the ranch," Ran said. "Calicheman doesn't have a government that keeps records like that. We've got the exact location the phone calls are coming from. With luck, that's spitting distance of where Oanh is being held. We don't know that."

He took a deep breath. The other four members of the team—not really his team, any more than the fingers belonged to the hand—watched him soberly. Each held a submachine gun and a pouch of extra magazines from the ship's arsenal.

"Mohacks stays with the boat," Ran continued. "The rest of us hit them fast and get out fast with the girl. Chances are they don't have weapons that'll penetrate a lifeboat's plating, but we don't know that for sure either. We've all got helmet links, but try to keep your mouth shut unless you've got something that needs to be said. Any last questions?"

"One thing," said Franz Streseman. He didn't look young any more. "You are all brave, and no doubt you have weapons training. I am the soldier here, however."

He surveyed his four older companions. "Shoot first, shoot to kill," he said coldly. "Don't threaten and don't hesitate. It may be that Oanh will be mistaken for an opponent. I myself may mistake her for an opponent."

Ran hadn't seen anything as bleak as the young Grantholmer's expression since he faced the Cold Crew in Taskerville.

"I say to you," Franz continued, "it is better that Oanh die than that she remain alive in the hands of these folk. I know them, I know their type. She is not human to them. We must not hesitate."

Wanda Holly licked her lips. "And on that cheerful note," she said, "I think it's time to go."

She glanced at the others, then added, "Good luck, fellows. We may all be crazy, but I'm damned glad I know people like you."

"Lift-off," said Mohacks as he engaged the controls. A fireball belched across the prairie. Grass had ignited in the flux of the magnetic motors thrusting the lifeboat up again at a flat angle.

* * *

"Three buildings," Mohacks announced as the terrain came up on his display. This was a lifeboat, not an attack vessel. There weren't any connections to export data from the pilot's console to those braced in the craft's cargo bay. "Looks like a barracks and a big garage across from the boss's house."

The lifeboat rocked and bucked, though 700 kph wasn't as bad in the tubular hull as it would have been in a conventional aircraft whose wingspan would lever turbulence into a hammering. The little vessel had an excellent passenger restraint system, but it wasn't equipped with the quick releases necessary for an assault force. Ran and his three companions wore their weapons slung tight to their chests while they gripped and pressed their boots against stanchions.

"Set us—"Ran began.

"I'm going to set us down in the middle, so the boat's between the barracks and the house," Mohacks continued calmly. "Hang on, I'm going to swing to bring the hatch facing the house."

"Babanguida, watch the barracks," Ran said. "You other two, in the house while I cover you."

Somebody had to do the former job, and Ran knew damned well that neither Wanda nor Franz would accept the order. Wanda was senior to him, and the kid was both a civilian and—as he'd pointed out—the only one of them who'd been trained for this sort of business.

The lifeboat banked hard and braked simultaneously. Ran's feet slipped from the seat stringer where he'd braced them. His legs flailed loose. Babanguida didn't try to grab his superior, knowing that if he did they'd both of them go bouncing around the cabin. Ran's hands clamped like welds to iron, the way they'd done a dozen times in the past when an unexpected shock threatened to fling him into sponge space for the cold remainder of eternity.

Mohacks slid the hatch open before the lifeboat grounded. The cabin filled with the motor roar that the hull insulation had damped to a rumble. Blue glare reflected like chained lightning, and the windblast pummeled those inside.

Ran used his last momentum to throw himself upright when the vessel grated to a halt beneath him. He unstrapped the long rifle and presented it, bracing his left palm on the side of the hatchway and resting the barrel on that outstretched thumb. Wanda, Franz, and Babanguida bolted past him.

The house was rambling and a single story, with four rooms in one portion and a fifth connected to the others by a covered dogtrot. A man looked out the door of the single room, silhouetted by the lamplight behind him.

Ran fired. The muzzle brake of his weapon spewed red flames back to either side. His body rocked with the familiar recoil. He absorbed the thrust with his back muscles instead of fighting it with the bones of his shoulder.

The man Ran shot threw his arms up. The bullet was explosive, but it was meant to penetrate deep within creatures weighing scores of tonnes. The charge burst in the middle of the room, shattering the windows outward in a violet flash.

The lights in the room across the dogtrot went out. The window was a cool rectangle against the building's warm siding. Ran swung and fired again, aiming at the center of the glass.

This bullet also exploded well within the room. Its flash and the miniature shrapnel of the bullet jacket weren't dangerous, the way a bursting grenade would have been, but they must have distracted the kidnappers inside. Franz kicked through the door an instant after the crack! of the 15-mm bullet. His submachine gun lit the interior with ragged yellow flashes. There was no return fire.

Babanguida opened up at the lifeboat's bow, out of Ran's sight. A return bullet clanged off the vessel's sturdy plating, but only one of them, and distant screams proved that the rating wasn't wasting ammo.

The man Ran shot in the single room had slipped to his knees. He gripped the doorjamb with both hands. Wanda Holly pointed her weapon past him, then turned without shooting to follow Franz. The victim slumped further, then rolled supine, his hands clutching the dirt and his boots in the room in which he had died.

Red and yellow flashes quivered within the long end of the building. The local weapons used a propellant that burned deeper in the spectrum than those from the Empress's arsenal. A bullet ricocheted from the building and howled past Ran. It thumped into a cabin bulkhead.

The red flashes reflected from the third room over. Ran aimed at that sidewall, not the window, and blasted the last round in his magazine through what seemed to be some thin cast panelling.

His bolt locked open. Thumbing cartridges from his bandolier loops into the magazine, Ran sprinted toward the far end of the long wing.

An orange flash followed his last shot. He'd hit a munitions store. Ammo detonated in a rattling chain like a tympani riff. A second orange blast knocked Ran down.

That was a good thing because the third explosion, following a heartbeat later, blew off the roof and sidewalls together. The walls were castings, all right: cast concrete. Some of the chunks were big enough to dent the lifeboat's hull.

Ran rolled to his feet and slammed the bolt of his rifle home. He wasn't sure whether he'd loaded two or three rounds.

"We've got her!" squealed a voice too high-pitched to sound like Wanda. Overlaying the words on the same radio channel, Franz Streseman shouted, "Baby baby baby!"

Ran reached the end of the building. A window was open. Someone was running away. Ran dragged his thermal goggles down away from his eyes. The goggles didn't give fine detail, and there was so much light now from the burning building that he didn't need them.

The running man was Gerd von Pohlitz. Firelight twisted the wrinkles of the big Grantholmer's clothing into tiger stripes. He was only a hundred meters away. It was a clout shot for a hunter like Ran Colville, who'd made over seven hundred one-shot kills at that range and longer.

Ran's finger tightened, then released its pressure on the trigger.

Let him go. Oanh was free—and no matter what had happened to the girl while she was a captive, one more corpse wouldn't change the past. It wasn't Ran Colville's business or any one man's business to rid the universe of sadistic sons of bitches. . . .

Von Pohlitz turned. He aimed his weapon, an automatic rifle, back at the building from which he had fled.

Ran didn't feel his trigger sear release—his action was too reflexive for that. His muzzle lifted in a triple flare, red flame from the bore and the side vents. The butt punished him, and for the first time tonight he noticed the enormous WHAM! of his shot.

The 15-mm bullet hit the receiver of the Grantholmer's rifle before punching through to the torso where it exploded. Gerd von Pohlitz's chest expanded. Violet flames flashed from his mouth and nostrils. His left arm fell separately from the body, and his head remained attached only by the neck tendons.

Ran turned. Franz was staggering toward the lifeboat with Oanh's still form in his arms. Wanda backed along behind him, firing short bursts into the house every time popping flames counterfeited motion.

"Come on!" Ran shouted, even though he himself was Tail-Ass Charlie. "Let's get out of here!"

He lumbered toward the open hatch, staggering because fatigue poisons laced all his muscles. But they'd done what they'd come for—

And there would be time later to think about exactly what they had done, the five of them.

* * *

The sounds of the Empress's loading occasionally rang through the fabric of the hull, but the process was nearly complete. The three-hour whistle had blown, and the passengers dispersed during the layover were dribbling back from hunting or the fleshpots of Calicheman.

"I thought of calling you all together to ask what the hell went on last night," Commander Hiram Kneale said as he paced his cabin. His voice wasn't loud, but it rasped like the coughs of a hunting lion.

Kneale had withdrawn his console into the deck. The decorative holograms on walls and ceiling were muted into a throbbing pearl gray. He was the only person in the room standing. Ran, Wanda, Mohacks, and Babanguida sat in a precise line on the bench extruded from the cabin wall.

Babanguida's left forearm bore a patch of bright pink SpraySeal over a blister. He'd touched it with the glowing barrel of his submachine gun as he cleared a jam. Despite Wanda's goggles, her eyes had been blacked by the same piece of flying debris that raised the livid bruise on her right cheek. Ran moved stiffly because of the punishment the rifle butt had given his shoulder.

Butter wouldn't melt in Mohacks' mouth. He glanced at his companions as if wondering why he had been summoned with the others.

"But then I decided," Kneale continued, "that I didn't want to know what had happened. That would just make me angrier. I think if that happened, I might do something that I would later regret. Much later."

He stared at his four subordinates as though he wished he was looking through a gunsight,

Wanda cleared her throat. "Has there been a complaint about our behavior, sir?" she asked.

"Will there be a complaint?" Kneale demanded harshly. "Colville. Will there be a complaint?"

Ran licked his lips. "No sir," he said, facing straight ahead rather than swivelling his eyes to meet the commander's.

"You didn't leave any survivors to complain, is that it?" Kneale said.

"Something like that, sir," Ran said. He cleared his throat. "Sir, this was entirely my doing."

"I've listened to your call to the Empress, Colville," Kneale said. "I know what you did, and I can bloody well guess what you all did! Look at you, for Chrissakes!"

Only Mohacks glanced around in response to the shouted command. He was still pretending to be innocent, though he knew the commander too well to think that it was going to do a lot of good.

"Sir," Ran said toward the bulkhead in front of which Kneale paced, "what we did, we did for the . . . honor of Trident Starlines."

"What you did," Kneale snarled, "you did because some stupid bastard thumbed his nose at you, and you decided to boot his ass through his shoulder blades to teach him a lesson."

Unexpectedly, the commander smiled. "Which I suppose is as good a definition of honor as we're going to find," he said. "Since we're all human."

Kneale muttered something to the AI. The surfaces of his cabin flashed back to holograms of the Empress's ports of call. The views weren't precisely restful, but they proved that the commander's mood had changed—or that a level had come off the emotional onion.

"Look," Kneale continued, "you went charging in without any plan, just hoping you'd get away with it And you did. But it was a lousy idea, and it could have embarrassed the company seriously. Don't do it again."

"Sir," Ran said, meeting Kneale's eyes, "they didn't have time to plan anything either. The snatch had to be set up after von Pohlitz disembarked. He could make a call to a buddy in the area, but this wasn't—"

He smiled.

"—Grantholm's Seventeenth Commando. Except on our side."

"If all Grantholm troops are as good as the Streseman kid," Wanda Holly said to no one in particular, "then Nevasa doesn't have a prayer. I followed him in, and there were six bodies in that first room."

She swallowed. "I think six."

"It's the fact that Streseman was along that permits me to trust your judgment," the commander said. "I'd like to think that you wouldn't have tried something like this if you hadn't had a wire to the top levels of the Grantholm government."

"The girl was our passenger, sir," Ran replied softly. "It's not our war. But she's our passenger."

"So she was," Commander Kneale agreed with a wry smile. He gestured toward the door. "Go on, go on," he said. "Trident Starlines doesn't thank you, because the company isn't going to know a thing about this if we're lucky. But I'm proud of you.

"Only the next time . . ." he went on, "I hope you'll let me in on the business."

Kneale's smile had changed into something that an impala might have noticed on the face of the last lion it ever saw.

Back | Next
Framed