"Stabilized," said the Second Officer in a tone of relief, as though he personally had been pushing upward to bring the Empress of Earth to a halt above the surface of Hobilo.
"Very good, Mr. Bruns," said Captain Kanawa. "Ms. Seligly, initiate docking sequence."
The First Officer engaged the autopilot. The starliner shuddered as the artificial intelligence took command of the six tugs locked against the hull. Seligly's fingers fanned over the manual keyboard, touching nothing but ready to assert control at the first sign of a hiccough in the software.
The Third Officer's console displayed the Mainland Terminal, a sprawl of buildings on raw red soil. The terminal was in the central highlands of Hobilo's larger continent. A web of pipes and monorail tracking joined at the terminal, but the lines' further ends disappeared into the mist-shrouded lowlands where all other human development on the planet had occurred.
Seven ships were already on the ground at Mainland Terminal, besides the rusting hulks of a dozen more dragged to the edge of the plateau. Four of them were purpose-built tankers, comparable in size to the Empress herself. The others were combination vessels with large cargo holds and provision for a limited number of passengers.
"Sir, we've beaten the Brazil in," the Third Officer noted.
"We have?" said Kanawa. His voice was so empty of emotion that the officers who had served with him for several voyages knew that he was concerned.
The Empress lurched, steadied, and began to drop at a smoothly constant rate of acceleration. Seligly tapped in a command to counteract a hint of rotation. One of the tugs was operating at well below optimum thrust, and the autopilot hadn't gotten the correction factor precisely right.
"Bridge, give me a ground link," said Captain Kanawa, continuing to stand beside his console. His left hand switched the display from figures to a visual of the terminal, but he didn't bother to look at it.
"Empress to Terminal Control," Kanawa continued after a pause.
"Terminal Control," said a colorless voice. Because Kanawa was using the general pickup, the response came through the bridge speakers unless he chose to switch it through a lockout channel to his ears only.
"Advise me as to the status of the starliner Brasil," Kanawa said. He stood rigidly upright, with his wrists crossed behind his back. "Over."
Mainland Terminal swelled on the visual displays. At higher magnification, patches of jungle could be glimpsed through the mist over the lowlands.
"The Brasil is seven hours and thirty-two minutes overdue," Terminal Control replied without emphasis.
"Control," Kanawa ordered. "Switch me to a human operator. Over."
The Empress trembled as the magnetic motors increased their braking thrust and the pulses reached a harmonic with the starliner's hull. The First Officer's fingers dipped, but this time the autopilot had erased the problem before Seligly could react to it.
The speakers crackled, then burped as though someone had tapped a microphone. "Empress, this is supervisor Vogt," said a voice with normal human intonations. "What can I help you with? Over."
"Ground, what's the situation with the Brasil?" Kanawa said. "You must have had some reports about her. Over."
"Not a word, Empress," the terminal supervisor said. "We thought you might know something yourself. Over."
"And why did you think such a bloody stupid thing as that?" shouted Captain Kanawa. "Empress of Earth, out!"
All those on the Empress's bridge kept their eyes focused on their instruments. A rating swallowed a sneeze to keep from calling attention to herself. Her eyes bulged.
Kanawa switched his console back to an alphanumeric display of thrust, fuel, and force vectors. It was the first time any of his bridge crew had seen the captain openly lose his temper.
* * *
"Know where you're going, Ran?" Wanda Holly asked from behind him on the noisy platform.
"You bet," Ran said, turning. "But I haven't a clue to how I'm going to get there. I figured there'd be signs up in the station."
The remaining contingent of Third Class passengers were marching down the rear ramp of the Empress into a huge shed whose sidewalk stood only a meter and a half high to permit the sluggish breeze to flow through. The emigrants looked around curiously, nervously. Some of them fanned themselves with their shirtfronts.
"If it's this hot in the highlands," Ran added, "what's it like down where the settlements are?"
"Muggy," Wanda said. "Not really hotter, but you can get used to anything if you have to. They'll have to," she added, nodding toward the emigrants.
First Watch was responsible for off-loading this time. The task was deemed simple enough that Kneale hadn't drafted in personnel from other watches.
"They don't seem to mind when they get off the ship here," she mused, as much to herself as to Ran. "But in a lot of ways, Biscay might be an easier place to live, once you settle in."
Wanda shrugged, as though losing a weight. "Where is it you want to go, then?" she asked.
"Taskerville," Ran said. "I'm not sure the place even exists anymore."
"Oh, it exists, all right," Wanda said. She pursed her lips. "By way of Kilmarny," she said, "but it's on the Hunter's Hill line, and that's down at this—"she pointed and began walking "—end of the platform."
Diesel-electric monorails passed with a hiss and the rattling of valves. Most of them were only two or three cars together, garishly painted but scraped and battered in appearance. The roof of the lead car invariably mounted a machine gun on a Scarff ring.
Some of the rough-clothed men and women on the platform carried guns of their own, powerful rifles or even plasma weapons. Ran glanced at them and frowned.
"It's for the wildlife," Wanda commented. "The Long Troubles ended when the Prophet Elias was hanged."
Ran nodded. "I didn't know what . . ." he said.
Wanda stopped at a two-car train whose engines chittered at idle. A metal sign above on the platform's overhang said Hunter's Hill, though corrosion had eaten away all but the first letter of Hill. Six people were aboard the train already. They sat in sullen apathy. Each guarded a bale of goods purchased or picked up at the port.
Wanda thumbed toward the sign. "They figure on Hobilo that you either know where you're going or you don't. Either way, it's no concern to anybody else. Unless you're a load of oil."
The monorail tracks dipped over one another leaving the terminal, but there seemed to be no common lines. Ran's index finger caressed the reader on his belt
A man detached himself from a refreshment kiosk and walked toward the cab of the train. He glanced at the Trident officers but didn't speak.
"That'll be the driver," Wanda said. She cleared her throat. "Do you want some company, Ran?" she added.
"Yeah, I think maybe I would," Ran said. "But it must be out of your way?"
A train accelerated out of the station with a squeal and clatter that devoured all conversation. Wanda Holly stepped to the cab and thrust a credit chip into the reader there. The driver watched without expression as he revved his engines up to operating load.
"Taskerville," Wanda said. The AI in the device debited her chip by the amount of the fere. "There isn't much difference in where you are on Hobilo, except for Crater Creek, where the city's domed and environmentally controlled. I wouldn't mind seeing Taskerville."
Ran paid his fere and followed Wanda into the lead car. The driver didn't bother to let them settle on the hard plastic bench before he threw his shift lever into drive and the train lurched forward.
A small freighter screamed skyward on its own motors and those of a pair of tugs, making the monorail sway as it plunged off the plateau toward the misty forests below.
"Why Taskerville?" Wanda said. When Ran didn't answer, she went on, "If you don't mind my asking?"
Ran cleared his mind of an image of guns winking in a swamp, while muzzle blasts splashed the water beneath them. "Sorry Wanda," he said. "Because my Dad was here."
Forest closed in as a green shadow. The driver extended a cutter from the bow of the lead car. Almost at once the sharp-edged loop began to slap at tendrils which had grown toward the line since the train made its inward run.
"During the Troubles?" Wanda asked.
"The end of them," Ran agreed. "It was three more months before they caught the Prophet, but Dad always said they'd broken the back of the Troubles at Taskerville."
He licked his lips. "He was one of the mercenaries hired by the corporations. I once asked him what he'd gotten out of—being a mercenary. And he said, 'A lot of things to think about, Ran.' Later, I found the chips his helmet had recorded during, during Taskerville. And I thought I'd . . . see the place myself."
"Your father's dead?" Wanda asked gently.
"Oh, yes," Ran said. "Nothing left of him but bones and maybe a few memories."
"No maybe there, friend," Wanda Holly murmured so softly that her lips scarcely seemed to move.
Something the size and shape of a dirty gray blanket hung from a tree just off the cleared line. It rotated as the monorail passed. One of the passengers on the rear car fired her rifle at the creature without evident effect.
Ran Colville's mind filled with bloody memories of sights his eyes had never seen.
* * *
"You can drive, you know," Oanh said as she pulled the aircar in a tight bank around a stand of conifers whose peaks reached many meters above the vehicle's present altitude. Oanh spoke harshly, and she showed a hard hand on the controls. They were traveling through the close vegetation at 40 kph.
"I've never driven one like this model myself," Franz said precisely. "You're doing better than I could."
He was half lying, but he didn't want a fight, and anyway, Oanh was in full control of the aircar. She was driving uncomfortably fast and cutting too close to obstacles, but those were deliberate ploys to get him to object—and thus put himself in the wrong.
They blasted down a boggy creek. Bands of denser mist flicked past the windscreen of the open car.
The danger was that in trying to make Franz react, Oanh would drive the vehicle into a tree or down the throat of a giant carnivore.
A dozen quadrupeds weighing between one and three tonnes apiece browsed among the reeds. They lurched up on their hind legs as the car overflew them. Each male had a coiled resonator on the end of his beaked snout. They hooted in mournful surprise.
Franz twisted in his seat to look back at the herbivores. "The guidechip said that you had to get much farther from the terminal to see herds like that," he said. "I guess it was wrong."
"Well, that's not surprising," Oanh said, her eyes straight ahead and her hands clamped like claws on the controls. "Everybody's wrong except you, aren't they?"
"Oanh, set her down and let's talk," Franz said.
"I don't want to set down!" Oanh shouted. She turned to glare at her passenger. "And there's nothing to talk about anyway, since you've made up your mind!"
"Love—"
An air plant lowered a trailer from a high branch, angling for an open space in which its fluorescent bloom would be visible to the nectar-drinkers that fertilized it. The car slammed into the flower with a jolt and a splotch of sticky pollen that looked like a bomb-burst on the bow and windscreen.
The tendril, freed of the flower whose weight it supported, sprang up. A coil of it snagged the barrel of the rifle Franz held upright beside his seat.
"Hey!" the youth bellowed. He managed to grab the weapon before the plant pulled it away.
Oanh gave a cry of despair and backed off the throttle. The aircar wobbled downward. They were headed toward a bed of spiky vegetation whose leaves slanted up at forty-five degrees to channel water to reservoirs in the stubby trunks.
Franz started to say something. He decided not to. Oanh advanced the throttle again, adjusted the fan attitude to bring the car to a hover, and landed them ably in a patch of lace-leafed plants shaded by the branches of tall trees. The same tendril that grabbed the gun had snatched Oanh's cap off and raised a red welt across her forehead.
Franz nestled the rifle back into its butt-clamp. The weapon was part of the rental vehicle's equipment, like the radio beacon, flares, and emergency rations.
Oanh shut off the motors and slumped on her controls. Franz put his arm around the girl's shoulders and kissed her cheek because he couldn't reach her mouth. She twisted to return the kiss. Her lips were wet with tears, and she continued to sob.
A pair of small creatures fluttered and chased one another through the branches above the vehicle. Occasionally a flash of vivid yellow would show through the foliage. Bits of bark pattered down.
Oanh drew back. "You say you have to go," she said, enunciating carefully. "But you don't. We'll be diverting from Grantholm because of the war, so they can't take you off the ship. And you say you hate the war!"
"The war is stupid and it's unnecessary," Franz said. "I knew that before I even met you. But I'm a Streseman, love, and I—have to go."
"There's no have to," she pleaded. "Individuals have to make decisions for themselves. Otherwise there'll be more blood and more death and everybody loses!"
The contradiction between Oanh's words and her determination to decide for Franz raised a touch of rueful humor in the boy's mind, but the expression didn't reach his lips. She was right, he supposed. And he was right, saying that he had to do his duty, because Stresemans did their duty at whatever the cost.
The whole system was rotten, but Franz Streseman turning his back on ten generations of family tradition wasn't going to change it for the better.
"I'm sorry," he said. He leaned toward her. For a moment, Oanh drew further away before she met his kiss. She began to cry again.
An animal whuffed close by. Franz sat bolt upright. He couldn't see the beast, but it was large enough that he could feel its footsteps on the thin soil. He freed the rifle from its boot and chambered a round.
Oanh wiped her face with her sleeve and switched the fan motors back on. The blades pinged through stems which had sprung into their circuit when the motors cut off. She swung the car steeply upward. A little forward angle would have smoothed the wobbly liftoff, but that would have taken them closer to the source of the noise while they were still at low altitude.
The creature walked into the clearing on four legs. It had a barrel-shaped body with a small head and a meter-long spike on either shoulder. One of its eyes rotated separately to follow the aircar without a great deal of interest. Ignoring the soft vegetation underfoot, the creature lifted up on its hind legs and began stripping tree branches of their bark and prickly foliage.
Franz laughed in relief. "Well, I guess it could've stepped on us," he said, "so I won't say it's harmless. The damned thing scared me out of a year's growth."
"Are there more of them?" Oanh asked. She held the aircar in a hover, even with the herbivore's raised head. "It must weigh five tonnes."
"At least," the boy agreed.
He held the rifle gingerly, now that he didn't need it anymore. The weapon was of an unfamiliar design. Franz wasn't sure how best to empty the chamber, and he was afraid to put it back in its clamp with only the safety catch to prevent it from firing in event of a shock.
They were both glad the creature had changed the subject, because they knew the discussion wasn't going anywhere.
"The guideb—"Franz said.
The creature that burst out of the shadowed undergrowth was bipedal and ten meters from nostrils to tailtip. It had the lithe ranginess of a bullwhip. As the herbivore tried to settle and turn, the attacker caught it with long, clawed forelimbs and slammed fanged jaws dosed on the victim's throat.
"Back!" Franz screamed as he pointed his rifle over the side of the car and leaned into it. Oanh had already slammed her throttle against the stops, transforming the vehicle's hover into a staggering climb.
The animals below shrieked like steam whistles as they rolled together across the forest floor. The carnivore kept clearof its victim's defensive spikes, but the shock of hitting even soggy ground beneath the tonnes of scaly body should have been devastating. A sapling twenty centimeters in diameter shattered when the creatures slammed against it.
Franz took a deep breath and relaxed, swinging the rifle's muzzle upward again.
"You didn't shoot," Oanh said. They were hovering again, a hundred meters in the air. The battle went on below through wrappings of mist roiled by the aircar's fans.
Franz looked at his weapon. He still didn't know how to clear the chamber. "There wasn't any need," he said. "If I'd had to, I would have shot."
Oanh was staring at him. It made him uncomfortable, though she no longer seemed angry. "Well," Franz said, "we're getting our money's worth of sightseeing, aren't we?"
Oanh adjusted the fens forward and brought the car around in a sweeping turn. "Let's go back to the terminal," she said. "There'll be a hotel there, or we can use your cabin on the ship."
Franz nodded, his face neutral.
"We don't have very much time," Oanh explained. She swallowed. "I don't want to waste what we have."
* * *
The fringes of Taskerville were colorful prefabs of reinforced thermoplastic, one or two stories high. They had been erected in the past fifteen or twenty years, since Hobilo got its own industrial base to process the hydrocarbons which permeated all levels of the planet's rocks.
Old Taskerville was built of limestone and concrete. In surviving structures, plastic tile had replaced the original roofs of shakes laid over wooden trusses, but the walls were as solid as rock outcrops.
That was true even of the buildings which had been blasted beyond repair in the fighting that ended the Long Troubles. Two of them stood gaunt and blackened on the north side of the square: a cube and a tall pyramid of concrete struts which had once been joined by full-height stained glass windows.
Originally the structures had been the Municipal Building and the Roman Catholic cathedral for the Western See of Hobilo. At the start of the Long Troubles, they became the military headquarters for the Sword of the New Dispensation and the home of the Prophet Elias, late Father Elias, an itinerant priest whose congregation spanned scores of hunting camps and wellheads.
Twice during twenty-seven years of war, flying columns of troops of the government in Crater Creek had penetrated to Taskerville. Both units were cut off. They attempted fighting retreats which dissolved into routs with eighty percent casualties. Mercenaries from a dozen fringe worlds, officered by Grantholmers and paid by a consortium of multiplanetary corporations, finally achieved the total victory which had eluded the local government.
At a cost.
"There's a monument in front of the burned-out buildings," Wanda said. She frowned. "It's been defaced."
"I don't think it's been defaced," Ran said. He walked slowly across the square, avoiding shills and pedestrians without seeming to look at them. "I think it's just birdshit. Or the local equivalent."
Ran guessed the permanent population of Taskerville was in the order of a thousand, but there was a floating supplement of at least twice that. The streets were thronged with lizard hunters and oil drilling personnel—and sailors. He'd already noticed several bands of crewmen from the Empress of Earth. Because Taskerville was the center of a frontier region, it had the facilities to entertain the rougher son of starfarers as well.
The square was an open-air market of kiosks and barrows, each covered with a bright sheet against the morning and afternoon rains. The permanent buildings were given over to businesses which required a degree of security: banking, high-stakes gambling, accommodations for wealthy transients, and—on the upper floors—prostitution, both high-volume knocking shops and a modicum of privacy for the independents working the square.
The monument was a Celtic cross, of stone rather than cast concrete and three meters high. Large letters on the crossbar read SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO DIED THAT FREEDOM MIGHT LIVE, but the double column of names down the vertical post was obscured by years of white streaking.
The creatures that flapped away from Ran's deliberate approach were winged and seemed to have feathers, so perhaps they were birds.
Ran keyed the chip that had been recorded by his father's helmet during the final assault. He saw—
Three of the armored personnel carriers in the square were burning. They bubbled with thick black smoke, from lubricants and plastics and the bodies of troops who died when rebel weapons destroyed the vehicles.
A dozen more of the APCs had survived. Their cupola guns fired ropes of pearl-white tracer point blank into the buildings the rebels still held on the north side. Other friendly troops—all of them from the Adjunct Regiments, the mercenaries; there were no Hobilo natives present except for those serving the Prophet Elias—shot from the cleared structures to the left and right, adding to the base of fire that prepared the assault.
The recording lens in Chick Colville's helmet lurched upward as he and Jive other mercenaries climbed through the top hatch of their vehicle. They jumped down to the pavement of cracked concrete and ran in a squat, as if forcing themselves against a fierce wind.
Colville was the last man. The troopers to either side of him fell, one like a sack of potatoes, the other twisted onto her back, a ragged tear in her thigh and a look of disbelief on her face when her visored helmet rolled free.
The muzzle flashes of the shots that felled them twinkled from twenty meters up the spire of the cathedral. Ricochets sparked away in puffs of powdered concrete.
Chick Colville was slower than his comrades because he carried the flamethrower. The fat nozzle rose into the field of view as he aimed. Recoil from the jet of metallized napalm shifted the viewpoint back a further step, but the flame rod arched between the concrete struts like a thread into the slot of a needle. An explosion cascaded sparks both inside and outside the cathedral.
Ran walked forward, seeing only the projected hologram. Vendors offered fruits at the edge of his awareness. He heard Wanda say harshly, "No, we don't want any!"
The cathedral's bronze doors had been blown into the sanctuary; cannonfire had cut completely through the stone post between the right and center portals. There was no one alive in the circular nave. The floor was littered with rubble and bodies.
"Careful, Ran," Wanda said. Her hand was on his arm, guiding him. "There's three steps."
The last snipers had used a scaffolding supported at mid-height by a wooden trellis. It was ablaze. A corpse hung from a crossbeam, and two bodies which had fallen to the floor also burned from Colville's flame.
The mercenaries preceding him stumbled over litter in their haste to reach the door behind the wrecked altar. An APC's automatic cannon fired into the nave. White flashes filled the air with shell fragments that, for a wonder, seemed to hit nobody.
A trooper from Colville's squad hurled a satchel charge through the doorway. Someone on the other side threw it back. Everybody flattened. There was a flash and a jolt. Everything jumped, and the rockdust lifted in a clinging pall. Colville scrambled to his feet.
In the hologram, a stone statue of the Virgin lay broken on the floor of the sanctuary. Wanda murmured a warning, but Ran's feet were already avoiding an obstacle which had not moved in thirty years.
The flamethrower was the weapon of choice for clearing the room beyond, but before Colville's nozzle steadied, two mercenaries jumped into the doorway firing their automatic rifles. Other troopers lobbed grenades past them. One of the men fell, but the other ducked clear just as the grenades slammed black pulses through the opening.
Wobbling like a drunk, Chick Colville reached the doorway with a woman from another APC carrying a magazine-fed grenade launcher.
Originally the space beyond had been a dressing room for the officiating priests. The followers of the Prophet had opened out the walls to create an inner sanctuary as large as the nave.
There were hundreds of people inside. Most of them were children, old folks, and the sick or wounded. They were chanting hymns, nodding to a dozen tempi. The eyes in their upraised faces were blankly glazed.
A handful of adult men, naked except for the sheen of blood, were cutting the throats of the others with butcher knives.
One of the healthy males, tonsured as a priest, turned and faced the recording lens. He bayed something that would have been madly unintelligible even if the helmet had recorded sound. The priest thrust his knife into the neck of an infant and jerked the blade forward through the tough gristle of the child's windpipe. When he tossed the spouting corpse aside, its head and torso were connected only by the spinal column.
The flame rod struck the priest in the face, then swept right and left across the big room. Ten seconds worth of fuel remained in Colville's bottles. When he had expended it, the abattoir had become a funeral pyre for dead and dying alike. The flames leapt and shuddered as the grenadier emptied her weapon also, and other mercenaries loosed into the charnel nightmare which the fire erased.
The recording ended.
Ran Colville sank to his knees. Wanda was holding him. "Are you all right?" she said. "Are you all right?" When he finally heard her voice, she was shouting.
Ran put his arms around the woman. He spat out words like bursts of automatic gunfire. "My Dad said, 'When you're old enough, kid, I'll show you; but you won't understand.' But he didn't show me. He died. And I found his chips. I watched them. I didn't understand."
He drew in a shuddering breath. "Only now I think I understand."
Wanda patted his back awkwardly, then eased him to his feet. "I don't know about you," she said, "but I could use a drink."
Ran forced a smile, hugged the woman close for a moment, then turned her loose.
"You know," he said in a falsely cheerful voice as they headed toward a kiosk selling home-brewed beer in plastic cups, "I thought Dad was a cold-hearted bastard. He never gave me a pat on the back when I did something right, and he never let it pass when I screwed up. And then he died."
Ran reached over without seeming to look and caught Wanda's hand, squeezing it. "He was a bastard, I guess. But I wish the poor bastard was around. So I could apologize for all the things I thought about him."
* * *
The single monorail car rocked around an outcrop almost concealed by the jungle. A trio of long-necked female herbivores cocked their heads at the vehicle. The male, forty meters long and twice the bulk of the members of his harem, hooted querulously and puffed out his bright red throat wattles. Ms. Dewhurst gasped in delighted amazement.
The car hummed back into its tunnel through the vegetation.
Wade chuckled contentedly. "There, old fellow," he said to Dewhurst "I told you this is the way to sightsee on Hobilo. Basic passage on one of the local runs, none of this nonsense about renting an aircar."
"If we'd rented a car, we wouldn't have just whipped by them and gone," Dewhurst grumbled, fulfilling his end of the symbiotic relationship.
"I shouldn't have thought you'd be driving under the canopy, here," Belgeddes said. "I wouldn't, at any rate. I leave that sort of thing to people like Dickie, here. He never saw a risk without wanting to take it."
"Tsk!" said Wade. "If I'd been thinking, I'd have suggested that we bring a cooler like that vendor at the back of the car has. This would be a good time for a beer—if I'd only thought ahead."
"Vendor?" asked Da Silva, looking at the half dozen Hobilo natives sharing the vehicle with the tourists. One of them was a woman of indeterminate age, seated on an insulated cooler that looked bigger than she herself was.
"So I surmise," agreed Wade. He looked tactfully away. Da Silva stood up, fumbled out a credit chip, and made his way down the swaying aisle toward the woman.
"Well then, Belgeddes," Dewhurst said. "We could all have rented one car and Wade here could have driven us himself. What were you here on Hobilo, Wade? Afield marshal?"
Dewhurst turned to glance out at the landscape of fleshy, spike-edged leaves just as a pair of lizards banked away from the window. Trie creatures were only thirty centimeters long nose to tail, and they were cruising for arthropods stirred up by the monorail's passage. They glided on flaps of skin stretched by their hind legs while they used their webbed forepaws like canard fins to steer.
Dewhurst saw open jaws of needle teeth fringing scarlet palates. He shouted and jumped back while his wife, who'd watched the lizards' approach, oohed in delight
"Actually, my friend . . ." Wade said as he looked toward the jungle. His mouth held only the slightest twist of satisfaction. "The last time I drove in this tangle, I hit a tree and had to hike the next twenty klicks. Nothing I'd choose to do again, either one of those things, I assure you."
Da Silva came back with five glass-bottled beers, jeweled with condensation.
Ms. Dewhurst looked at the local brew with an expression mingled of curiosity and horror, the way she might have viewed the thing her cat was playing with on the rug. She waved the offer away.
"All the more for the rest of us," Belgeddes said contentedly.
Dewhurst mopped his face with a kerchief and settled his expression behind the cloth. "Racing to rescue hostages during the Long Troubles, I dare say, Wade?" he said in a slightly wheezy voice. "When you had the crash, I mean?"
"Coming back, actually, weren't you, Dickie?" Belgeddes said around the mouth of his beer.
"Yes, that's right," Wade agreed. "And they put a burst into the rear linkages—firing from the church dome." He shook his head sadly. "I was a young fellow then, idealistic. I didn't dream the rebels would put armed men in their churches, for pity's sake!"
"Dewhurst was wondering if you were a field marshal," Belgeddes said. "That's not how I remember it."
"Certainly not," Wade said. "Civilian, purely a civilian at the time. But the poor fellow's daughters—Varkezadhy, it was, planetary manager for Simourgh Corporation—had been kidnapped as hostages. Whatever you thought of the chap—"
"Simourgh gives a bad name to greed," Da Silva said through pursed lips.
"—or of Simourgh," Wade agreed, nodding, "I couldn't let that happen to a pair of sweet little children. Slipped in from behind on foot—"
"That can't have been easy, Dickie," Belgeddes said.
The monorail hummed over a slough of water black with tannin dissolved from the logs rotting in it. Animals stared at the car or dived away, but even Ms. Dewhurst was watching Wade now.
"Not so very hard," Wade said in self-deprecation. "They weren't expecting it, you see. One man, that is. And I stole an aircar when we escaped."
He sighed. "I often think," he continued, "that if I'd assassinated the Prophet instead of snatching the girls back, things might have been different."
"The Prophet Elias was there?" Da Silva blurted.
Wade nodded. "Oh, yes," he said. "It was at Taskerville, don't you know? But I was naive, as I say. Cold-blooded murder was just beyond me then." "Wait a minute," said Dewhurst. "If the car crashed, then what happened to the hostages? The little girls, you call them."
"Eight years standard," Belgeddes said. "I'd call that little." His hand wavered toward the full bottle. "I wonder, if no one else is interested . . . ?"
Wade's slim, aristocratic fingers closed on the bottle's neck. "A thirsty business, thinking about old times," he said. "If no one minds?"
He took a deep draft from the bottle. Something that looked like grass floated in the liquid.
"The girls?" Wade resumed. "Well, I brought them back with me, of course. They could walk, most of the way, and I was younger then and fit."
He sighed. "I don't mind telling you, though—"
Belgeddes pointed. As if on cue, a monster with high shoulders and hog-like jaws crushed through a flowering shrub and rasped a buzzsaw challenge to the monorail. The beast was very nearly as big as the vehicle. The car speeded up. The driver tracked the creature with the automatic cannon over his cab until they were safely past
"—that there were times I was nervous about it," Wade concluded. He smiled and finished the beer, grass and all, with a rhythmic pumping of his throat
* * *
"I think I could take the heat," Wanda said, "but not the humidity."
The mist-shrouded sky was a sheet of white metal in which the sun was only a brighter shimmering. Driven by warmth, moisture, and light diffused over sixty-two percent of the daily cycle by Hobilo's atmosphere, the jungle encroached not only from the fringes of Taskerville but also from above. Air plants draped themselves from most horizontal surfaces of the town, and saplings managed to root themselves wherever mud had splashed.
Ran smiled. "People can take whatever they have to," he said. "It wouldn't be my choice for home either, though."
He finished his beer—which had a fruity taste. Not bad, exactly; wet, which his dry throat had needed, and from a refrigerated keg; but he was pretty sure he didn't want to know a lot about the conditions in which the stuff had been brewed. "I wonder if there's a place to get a decent meal around here?" he asked.
The counterman had one eye and a withered arm. From the look of the scars, they'd been made by a knife rather than a lizard's claws. He squirted more beer into Ran's cup, filling it halfway with a head that spilled down the sides.
"There ought to be something," Wanda said. "There's a good place back at the Terminal—"
"Hey buddy!" the counterman said. "You didn't pay for the second beer!"
Ran's eyes glazed, "You're right," he said in a frozen voice. "And I didn't see how far I could stuff the cup up your asshole. So I'd say we were quits."
The counterman jerked against the back of his kiosk. His hand groped for something under the counter, but he didn't look down and his hand clutched air. Wanda offered him a mocking salute, then took Ran's arm and guided him away. "He didn't expect that from a starchy Trident officer," she said in amusement.
Ran managed a chuckle. "He wasn't talking to any kind of officer," he said. "That—Dad's recording. Kicked me back, you know?"
"You've done it, so it's over now," Wanda said as she steered them through the ruck.
A woman selling jewelry made from lizard teeth and light metal clutched Ran's wrist, crying, "Buy a pretty for your—"
Wanda leaned across her companion to stiff-arm the woman away.
"We didn't talk much, Dad didn't," Ran said musingly. He put his hand on Wanda's nearer shoulder as if he needed her support. "I knew he'd carried a flamethrower, though, and once 1 asked him what it weighed. He said—and I didn't think he was answering me—he said he didn't know any flamethrower man who'd survived Hobilo. I said, 'But you did, Dad.'"
Wanda reached up and squeezed Ran's hand against the epaulet of her uniform.
"And he said," Ran continued in the same wondering tone, "'No I didn't, boy.' And he told me to leave him alone, like he usually did. And he got even drunker that night than usual. And I didn't understand."
They were walking toward the south entrance to the square. The buildings to either side of the street had concrete walls on the ground floor but plastic for the upper three stories.
A bank had the corner location in one of the buildings. An outside staircase beside the bank served the upper floors. At its foot, six men in blue uniforms stood around a prostitute wearing a backless lime-green dress with fishnet stockings of the same hue. The color and pattern made her look like a reptile, an impression which her narrow face reinforced.
"They aren't wearing caps or nametags," Wanda said, recognizing trouble by the fact the group of men were prepared for it with anonymity.
"Look, not all of you," the whore said. "Two at a time, for another five over—"
"They're ours," Ran said, jolted back to the present and glad to return. "They're from the Cold Crew."
"Let's not have any trouble, gents," said the pimp walking up behind the group. He was tall and snake-thin. He kept his hands ostentatiously in his pockets. "Little Mary's going to give you—"
Two of the sailors spun as though they'd rehearsed the maneuver a hundred times—and maybe they had, in the docks and dives of that many planets. They grabbed the pimp by the elbows, bent his arms back, and hurled him against the window marked SECURITY FINANCE.
The protective grating saved the glass. The pimp bounced back. His hands flopped loose. There hadn't been time to use whatever weapon he carried. The whore screamed. A sailor grabbed her from behind, with one calloused hand across her mouth and the other gripping her throat.
Wanda reached under the front of her tunic. Ran caught her hand. "Mine," he said.
A proctor with a tall red hat and a brassard dangling on his chest turned toward the commotion. He carried a shock rod and a pair of stun-gas projectors.
A sailor pointed his index finger at the proctor. "You want some?" he cried. "There's plenty for you!"
Spectators spun as though the finger repelled them. The proctor stared up at the top floor of the building, then pivoted slowly and sauntered in the other direction.
The two men with the pimp hurled him again. This time they missed the window. The victim walloped soddenly against the concrete wall.
The prostitute wasn't struggling. Her eyes were alert but resigned.
Ran approached the group with his hands at his sides, fingers spread and empty One of the Cold Crewmen grunted a warning to the others.
"Want to join him, buddy?" a sailor snarled.
"Not me," said Ran. "Kephalonians, aren't you?"
It wasn't what the Cold Crewmen expected to hear from an officer of the Empress of Earth. Orders in a tone of false comradeship; wheedling perhaps; threats if the fellow was a fool, and he was fool enough to get involved, that was clear from the start.
"You got a problem with that?" the same sailor responded.
"Nope," Ran said. "Niko Mazurkas was from Kephalonia. I saw him dim three engines himself on the Askenazy for nine hours, till we made Manfred's Reach."
"Bullshit!" a sailor said. "You're a fucking officer!"
"You bet I am," Ran said. "Now. But I worked one engine and Niko worked three, nine hours and no relief. I was just a kid and it almost killed me, but we did it."
"God himself couldn't keep three engines trimmed smooth," said the man holding the whore.
"Smooth?" Ran crowed. "It was rough as a cob! But we got the bitch there, and we got five more men to replace the six gone blind from the rotgut they bought on Wanslea."
"Bullshit!" a sailor repeated.
"No, he's telling the truth," said the apparent leader. "Look at his rucking eyes."
The man holding the whore let her go, then gave her a little push to convince her that it was really happening.
"Ever since then," Ran said in a flat voice, staring a million klicks through the lichen-scaled concrete of the building, "I like to buy drinks for Kephalonians. Can I buy you men a drink?"
The Cold Crewmen looked at one another. "Naw, that's okay," the leader said. "Last thing I want is to have pay in my pocket when I go back aboard."
He took his soft cap out of his pocket and settled it on his head, then adjusted it by feel so that the legend embroidered on the tally, Empress of Earth, could be read by anyone looking at him.
"C'mon, you bastards," he added in gruff embarrassment. "Let's find a proper cathouse."
As the sailors strode off, arms akimbo and kicking their toes out with each step, one of those who had grabbed the pimp turned. "Hey, Lieutenant?" he called. "See you round!"
The prostitute half knelt, half squatted beside her pimp. Her clothes, though brief, were constraining.
The pimp groaned softly, which meant his head was harder than anybody would've expected. Ran nodded toward the whore and started to walk away.
She moved fast and with birdlike grace, putting herself in his way. Wanda stepped forward but paused.
The whore looked tiny up close. What Ran had thought was a skullcap was her own hair. It was dyed in streaks of black and a color close to that of her garments, then lacquered down. The marks of the sailor's fingers were red against her pale throat.
"I suppose you expect a freebie for what you did, huh?" the whore demanded in a shrill voice.
"I don't expect anything," Ran said. He tried to step around her.
She blocked his way again. She wasn't as young as he'd first thought. "I guess you think you're too good for me!" she said. "Is that it?"
He looked at her and she glared back. Whatever she saw in Ran Colville's eyes didn't bother her the way it did others when he wasn't careful; when he forgot or remembered, however you wanted to say it.
"I'm not too good for anybody," he said aloud. "Quite the contrary."
"Then come on up," the whore said crisply as she took him by the hand. "It's just up on the third."
Ran looked over his shoulder at Wanda Holly. "I'll be a little while," he said without inflection.
She raised an eyebrow. "Take a long time," she said. "Take twenty minutes. I'll have another beer."
She turned and stepped toward a drink kiosk—a different one—before Ran could reply.
If he intended to.