David Drake - Cross The Stars

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Cross the Stars

by David Drake

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57821-9

Cover art by John Berkey

First Baen printing, July 1999

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Electronic versio by WebWrights

http://www.webwrights.com

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

To Jim Baen, for ten years of making me a better writer, and

for acting as a friend.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This novel began in discussions with Glenn Knight, while we

were some thousands of miles apart. Jim Baen and

Bernadette Bosky were of inestimable help in matters of

direction. Karl Wagner—kindly old Doc Wagner—provided

technical data as always. When my nerves were frazzled,

Sharon Pigott spent an evening keying in the last of the

rough draft and saving me a further day and a half of

crushing work. And my wife, Jo, made friendly,

dispassionate, enormously helpful comments on that rough.

Blessings to you all.

CHAPTER ONE

A hologram of a tank, bow-on as it plowed through a brushfire, filled most of the wall behind President

Hammer's desk. Either by chance or through Hammer's deliberation, the tank was Two Star—Danny

Pritchard's unit twenty years before, when he had been a sergeant in the Slammers and not Hammer's

chosen successor.

"Hey, snake," the President called cheerfully when he saw it was Pritchard who had entered the office

unannounced.

Hammer tilted away the desk display which he had been studying. He had not let age and the presidency

blunt all the edges of his appearance. If Hammer's hair was its natural gray now, then it was still naturally

his own. His shoulders and wrists would have done credit to a larger, younger man. There was a paunch

below desk height that had not been there five years before, however. No practical amount of exercise

could wholly replace the field work of the lifetime previous. "Had a chance to glance over the proposal

from Dominica?"

"Glance, yes," Danny said, perching himself on the arm of an easy chair instead of the seat. The fabric

responded to his weight, squirming in an attempt to mold itself to his contours. Pritchard preferred a

solid bench, so he gave as little purchase as possible to the luxury with which Hammer disarmed visitors.

"I like the idea of having somebody else pay for part of our army, sure . . . and, well, train it while things

are quiet here on Friesland. But I think Dominica's too far if we—needed the guns back in a hurry."

Danny popped the rolled notes he held against his knee. It was a sign of the nervousness which he

otherwise controlled. "Thing is, Alois," he continued to the older man, "that isn't what was on my mind

right at the moment." He smiled. "Even though it should have been."

Hammer snorted. He spun his desk display toward his Adjutant and heir presumptive. "Teitjens sent this

over as background before he briefs me on the slump in heavy equipment export projections. I'd sooner

listen to you, on the assumption that I'll at least understand your problem when you've finished."

"Yeah, well," the younger man agreed. "The problem's easy."

He slid down into the cup of the chair after all. The office walls were a slowly-moving fog-blue, almost a

gray. Pritchard slitted his eyelids. The hologram behind the President could have been a real tank on a

skyswept plain. "We got a homeworld query on one of our veterans. Do you remember Captain Don

Slade?"

Hammer nodded calmly over his clasped hands. "Mad Dog Slade? Sure, I remember him. He was the

one man I really wanted who insisted on retiring when he heard his father'd died. Home to Tethys,

wasn't it? The Omicron Eridani Tethys, I mean. I offered him a duchy here on Friesland, too, Danny."

"Via, he was a duke back home, Colonel," Pritchard said to the blurred man and to the tank. "He was

the next thing to a king there if he'd wanted to be." The Adjutant opened his eyes again and sat as erect

as the cushions would permit him. "We were—well, he did me a favor. We were friends, Don and me.

Tell the truth, he didn't much like to be called Mad Dog."

"Well," Hammer said with a laugh, "if he'll come back, I'll call him Duke Donald or any curst thing he

chooses. Not because he's a friend of yours, Danny—though that too—but because you can't have too

many people like Slade on your side." The President did not precisely frown, but his face lost most of its

laughter. "Among other reasons, because if they're on your side, they aren't on the other guy's."

"I think Don had had about enough of sides when he left here," Pritchard said. He looked up at the

ceiling and remembered his big, black-haired friend in the spaceport at their last meeting. "He said he

was ready to spend the rest of his life fishing like his grandfather."

"Fishing?"Hammer repeated in angry amazement. "He was going to go from one ofmy tank companies

to fishing?"

It was his Adjutant's turn to laugh. Danny gestured with his notecards and said, "Well, fishing on Tethys

isn't that different from the sort of jobs we gave M Company, Alois. There's a lot of water there, and the

things that grow in it are pretty much to scale, from what Don told me. . . .

"But the thing is," Pritchard added, sobering, "Don didn't get there. We got a query from—" he checked

the uppermost card from habit rather than from present need— "Marilee Slade, asking if Don were still

on our establishment."

"Not in two years," Hammer said with a frown. "Mother? Or Via! Not his wife, is she? Don didn't take

home leave in, well, at least the ten years since I promoted him to ensign."

"Seems to be his sister-in-law," the younger man said. Hammer had already swung the display back

around. The President's fingers were calling up Slade's personnel file and planetary data on Omicron

Eridani II—one of a trio of worlds named Tethys by their original settlers. "Brother's widow, I'd guess,

from the way the query was worded," Pritchard continued. "Never talked much to Don about why he'd

joined the Slammers, but I sort of gathered this lady had something to do with it. Also he was the

younger son, that sort of hereditary nonsense." The Adjutant's eyes met those of the childless President.

There was iron in the grin of each man.

Hammer grunted approval at whatever he saw on his display. "Council of Forty runs the place," he

muttered. "Hereditary oligarchy. You know, I like the look of some of these average metal prices. Might

be worth our while to ask for quotes, especially on the manganese. Either they sweat their workers like I

wouldn't dare, or they've got a curst slick operation."

He gestured over the desk with an upraised palm. "But I don't suppose you thought you needed me to

clear a trace on Don Slade, did you? Shoot."

"He left here on a tramp full of hard-cases. He was in a hurry and he wouldn't listen to reason," Pritchard

said to the ceiling. "Golf-Alpha-Charlie Five Niner. I located a survivor on Desmo and got the story.

Fellow'd gotten to Desmo on an Alayan ship. Don had been aboard the Alayan, too, but he'd gotten off

at a place called Terzia. Produces medicinals. Place got one or two tramp freighters a month, so it

shouldn't have been a bad place to trans-ship."

Pritchard shrugged himself out of the chair again and began to pace the large, austere office. "No

question of coercion," he continued. "The survivor says Don tried to talk them all into working their butts

off in the jungle or some such thing. Don was free to go, just like the others he was with—andthey all

lifted off."

Compared to Hammer, the brown-haired Adjutant was tall. He slapped the notes on his left palm.

"What the problem turned out to be is that Terzia's refused landing rights to every ship that's approached

it since the Alayans lifted off. It could be chance; but chance or not, the result's the same. For over a

year, Don's been caged there as sure as if he was behind bars . . . and he may be that, too, for anything

we know otherwise."

Hammer was playing with the controls of his display again. "Terzia's got real-time commo," the President

said in the mild voice that he used when his brain was busy with something besides the words he was

speaking.

"Yeah, and that's funny," said Pritchard. "I got the impression that the place was virtually pre-industrial.

Exports some high-purity natural medicinals, but nothing in quantity. No quantity that there'd be a

Stadtler Communications System, unless the economic pyramid comes to a pretty sharp point."

The President nodded. "One projection system, one Transit launch, one of a lot of things. One Don

Slade right now, though that wasn't going to show up on a Commercial Movements Summary, was it?"

Hammer's fingers tapped the surface of the display gently. "Though that may be a flaw in the compiler's

outlook, not Terzia's."

Hammer got up from his chair also. He ambled past the hologram. Beyond that wall of his office were

the grounds of the Presidential Palace, lushly beautiful and maintained for no purpose but the President's

enjoyment. Hammer did not object to the gardens, but it was at his orders that the crystalline window

giving onto them had been replaced by the hologram. He saw the palace grounds only through the

windows of his armored limousine as an incident of travel. "Right now, it's the projection system that

matters," he said aloud. "You'll have Margritte handle it?"

Danny nodded at the reference to his wife. "We've got a few other people supposed to be trained on the

Stadtler rig," he said. He rubbed his lower back and ribs absently with both hands. "Sometimes it works

for them, sometimes it doesn't. With Margritte, it works, and I hope to blazes there's somebody on

Terzia that good too. . . ."

Danny Pritchard had made a point of wearing civilian garments ever since the day of Hammer's

inauguration. His present suit was as soft and smooth as the creamy shimmer of its color . . . and it was

acutely uncomfortable on a body that suddenly felt the need for battle-dress again. "Alois," the Adjutant

continued, "that leaves a couple questions."

"Margritte has a blank check," Hammer said. "If they won't listen to reason about Slade until she

threatens that we'll land a Field Force regiment, she can do that."

"Terzia's a full seventy Transit minutes away from us," Pritchard said flatly. "They may think they're far

enough away to be safe, so they don't have to listen to us."

Hammer turned. He was no longer the paunchy ruler of a complex industrial world. He was a

commander whose troops had stormed Hell a score of times before and might do it again.

"If they won't listen tous, they'll listen to our guns, won't they?" Hammer said. His voice was as hard and

sincere as the bow of the tank behind him. "Slade broke up a Guards Regiment with one tank company

and a battalion of half-trained militia. If the Guards had taken the port behind us, Danny, you and I

wouldn't be standing here, would we? Though our skulls might still be on poles out front."

Pritchard shrugged like a dragonfly beginning to pull free of its cocoon of soft, cream fabric. "I'd roughed

out some contingency plans," he said as he turned to the door. "I'll work on specific movement orders

while Margritte tries to get a connection with Terzia."

"Tell them," Hammer called to his Adjutant's back, "that I don't know if we can release Don Slade alive

by force. But I'll promise to burn their planet for his funeral pyre if we can't."

For some moments after the door closed, Hammer continued to stand where he was: silhouetted against

the bow of the tank.

CHAPTER TWO

The Citadel was a spike in relief against the mottled turquoise sky. There was no bulky starship on the

landing platform beside the tower.

Don Slade swore very mildly, his voice as leaden as his heart. He stepped aside to let the work gang

pass him as the trail dipped back into the jungle.

This was the one vantage point on the trail's length. Slade had cradled the short barrel of his powergun in

the crook of his left arm as he marched ahead of the column. Now he held the weapon vertical for

safety. The butt was against his hip, and the muzzle touched at eyebrow height the tree against which the

tanker leaned wearily.

Bedyle, the foreman, stopped beside his superior. "Problems, sir?" the lightly-built humanoid asked in

Spaceways English. The language differed radically from the version of English Slade had learned to

speak as a boy on Tethys, but it—Spanglish—provided a medium of trade throughout the human

universe . . . and beyond that universe, as on Terzia. Though it was sometimes difficult for Slade to

remember that he and the Terzia herself were the only two humans on the planet.

"No problem, Bedyle," Slade said. "Nothing new, at any rate. There's just no ship. Still."

Slade's black hair was cropped short on his head and jaw for comfort. Hair coiled like strands of

honeysuckle over his bare chest and splashed down his limbs to the backs of his hands and feet. From a

distance, he had a bestial appearance which the calm of his expression belied. Slade was taller by forty

centimeters than the tallest of the work gang; taller and stronger besides than most of the humans whom

he had met in a life of knocking about the universe.

"You know, Bedyle . . ." the big man said. His eyes were on the distant spire, but his mind was much

farther away. "You'd think after nine days in the copper-pod jungle, that place would look good. But . . .

if there was a Palamede slave-ship docked there, I'd ship out in its hold before I'd take another step

through the gate of the Citadel."

"Your life is so very bad, then?" the foreman asked softly.

The workers were filing past, chanting something melodious and without meaning. Slade had been

unable in a year to learn a word of the native language. The Terzia swore that when her ancestors had

landed on the planet, the autochthones already spoke Spanglish. There was no reason to believe that she

was lying . . . or that she was telling the truth, for that matter. Slade had no way to judge the Terzia's

statements.

The locals, males and females alike, carried fifty-kilo burdens of copper-pods without signs that their

frail-looking bodies were being strained. They were nude. Only in the greenish cast underlying their

brown skins, and in the lack of external genitals in the males, were they demonstrably inhuman.

Slade had personal experience of the human characteristics of some of the females.

"Bad?" Don Slade said, echoing the foreman. The sounds of lesser animals seeped from the jungle and

merged with the voices of the work gang. "Via, no, Bedyle. Life isn't bad. I've got every luxury I could

dream of, and the most beautiful woman I've ever met. I've got a job I'm needed at—" he nodded

toward the workers he supervised and protected—"and it keeps me on my toes besides. I don't even

get bored, what with all the different habitats we crop. I'd have to say my life is perfect."

The man paused. He turned to scan as much of his surroundings as he could see through the

broad-leafed, ten-meter plants that made up the basic vegetation of this spot. A train of colorful,

multi-legged creatures chased itself around one fleshy stem. The joints of the beasts' exoskeletons

clattered softly.

"The only problem is," Slade went on, "its not the life I want to live. And there's not a curst thing

anybody can do about that until another ship sets down."

The sucking sound of a tree being pushed up from beneath was overlaid by the scream of the worker

caught in the first pair of pincers.

Slade pumped the fore-end to charge his weapon as he pivoted the butt to his shoulder. The monster's

emerging head was toward the back of the file. It curved from the ground, dripping loam from its

compound eyes and from the agate-melded segments of its broad carapace. A workman, streaming

blood where the knife-edged pincers entered his body, was being transferred to the maw that gaped

sideways to receive him. Slade had no time to pick his shot there, however. The real danger lay at the

other end of the carnivore's rising body.

Along ten meters of the trail, pairs of pincer-tipped legs slashed out of the soil like sprouts in time-lapse.

Three other workmen had been caught and were being swung toward the head end for ingestion. The

survivors of the file screamed and leaped into the jungle. Their burdens tumbled in the air behind them.

At the further end, toward the Citadel, waved the tail and the slim, meter-long cone of the creature's

sting. Slade fired at the base of it.

The carnivore lay ambushed on its back beneath the trail. As the pincers struck upward, the tail arched

toward its prey. Large prey would be dispatched by a sting, while numbers of smaller victims—like the

file of laborers—would be immobilized by sprayed venom even if they had escaped the first thrust of

pincers. Now the impact of the bolt caused the tail to spasm. It drove a stream of chartreuse venom

from the sting a moment before it would have been properly aimed at the work gang.

Slade was turning toward the monster's head again even as the jet of poison splattered onto the foliage

above. The ground beside the man was cracked and heaving. A jointed leg as thick as his wrist lashed

toward him, pincers clicking. The carnivore was squirming to turn its body upright.

Slade fired, stepped sideways, and fired twice more in rapid succession. A drop of poison struck his

right shoulder and splashed upward across his neck, ear, and biceps.

The first three bolts from the powergun had shattered the creature's armor. The sting hung askew, one of

the foremost pair of legs had been blown from its socket, and the cyan flash of the third round had

cratered the curve of the head shield. The bolts liberated their energy instantaneously, however. Despite

the amount of surface damage the powergun did, no single shot could penetrate to the vitals of this huge,

loosely-organized carnivore. Slade's fourth round was aimed at the ulcer left by the third. The bolt struck

in a gout of vaporizing internal tissue as the poisoned gunman screamed and dropped his weapon.

Skin was already sloughing where the venom drop had struck. Over the areas of secondary contact the

skin was turning gray and black. Slade slapped his chest injector plate with his left hand because his right

arm and side had gone numb. Leaf mold steamed beneath the hot iridium barrel of the gun he had

dropped. The injector dumped stimulant and anti-allergenic directly into Slade's anterior vena cava.

Under its impact and that of the venom, he staggered. He fumbled a medicated compress out of the kit

at his belt and scrubbed at the damaged area. The fire in Slade's blood damped down as the compress

debrided, then covered, the swatches where the skin was dead.

Although Slade had not lost consciousness, his conscious mind was surprised to find that he was

kneeling beside his gun. His torso felt as if it swelled and relaxed with every beat of his heart. There had

been enough breeze to carry one droplet of the unaimed venom to him. It had almost been enough to be

fatal.

The creature was dying with the noisy lethality of a runaway truck. It hammered its surroundings. The

middle part of its body was still within the trench in which it had lain hidden, while both ends lashed the

vegetation above. Across the trail and the heaving exoskeleton from Slade, a stunned laborer tried to

drag himself further into the jungle. A pincered leg gouged the earth beside him. Slade cursed and tried

to leap to the injured worker's aid.

Slade had forgotten the amount of damage done to his own system by the drugs and counter-drugs that

roiled within him.

Instead of clearing the monster as he had intended, the man landed on the blotchy carapace. His feet slid

out from under him. The carnivore was trying to arch its center segments from the trench. Its weight

pinned Slade's shins to the soft loam. The laborer scuttled safely behind the bole of a tree. The leg

whose wild thrashings had endangered the native now recoiled toward the man. The creature's optic

nerves and central ganglion had been destroyed, but its autonomic nervous system was making a

successful attempt to heave the great body erect reflexively.

The powergun would have been useless even if Slade still held it. The carnivore was dead, but only time

or a nuclear weapon would keep its corpse from being dangerous. Slade grabbed the limb as it swung

for him. His biceps swelled as they directed the pincers down onto the dirt a hand's breadth short of his

chest. They dug into the soil like the recoil spades of projectile artillery. That gave the leg purchase

against the massive thrust it exerted a moment later.

The creature squirmed wholly clear of the trench. Its meter-thick body carried Slade up with it as its

weight released him. There were tiny chitinous projections where the carapace armor joined that of the

belly. They flayed the big man's calves through the tough, loose trousers that had covered them.

Slade threw himself out of the way. He was limited to the strength of his upper body because his legs

were still numb. The creature was squirming off mindlessly into the jungle like a giant centipede. One of

the legs of a rear segment still impaled a laborer. The corpse's drag kept that limb out of synchrony with

the fluttering fore-and-aft motion of the others. The body segment itself twitched out of the line the

remainder of the creature was trying to take.

In the dirt behind the carnivore dangled its sting. The plates that should have held and directed the

weapon were shattered. Chartreuse venom still dripped and left a dark trail on the ground. In the wake

of the creature's clattering exit, the jungle came alive with the moans of injured laborers.

Slade staggered to the fallen bundle that held the main medical supplies. When he had an opportunity, he

would do something about the bloody agony of his own calves. They would wait—would have to wait—

for Slade to treat the laborers who were already going into shock from trauma or poisoning.

The Citadel was temporarily only a memory behind a curtain of sweat and adrenalin.

CHAPTER THREE

At the top of her tower, the Terzia shuddered because a human would have shuddered in reaction to the

scene she had watched. The breaking earth, the pincers stabbing upward with enough force to penetrate

wood . . . the venom drifting forward in a haze, burning like lava the bare flesh it contacted. . . .

Everything that happened was out of her control once it began. But the danger had to be real or the

exercise was pointless . . . as it seemed to be pointless anyway, to judge from the bleakness of Slade's

remarks to Bedyle.

The Terzia's awareness extended across all the life forms native to the planet. She watched from her

tower and through the eyes of the laborers in Slade's gang, both the hale and the dying. When the

brain-blasted carnivore stumbled against the tree trunk, the Terzia felt the impact both through the chitin

and through the bark. Sunshine and stargiow, breezes and rain all over the world simultaneously, were as

much a part of her consciousness as was her terror of a moment before.

Like the wind, the chime of the Stadtler Communications Device was a stimulus external to the Terzia in

all her facets. The human simulacrum in the tower turned the unit across from her in the open room.

The Stadtler Device consisted of a massive chair which faced a niche surrounded by a bank of cabinets.

The smooth surfaces of chair and cabinets covered electronics as sophisticated as any other array in the

present human universe. There was, in fact, no certainty that the original provenance of Stadtler Devices

was human at all. A glaucous light on one chair-arm pulsed in harmony with the three-note chime.

The Terzia stepped toward the unit without hesitation and without any dimming of her awareness of

every other factor sensed by the planet's native life. Stadtler Devices were almost solely the prerogative

of governments, and generally governments of the richest worlds and nations. The units, built on or at

least shipped from Stadtler, provided instantaneous communications over astronomical distances—at

astronomical cost. A planet like Terzia could scarcely have afforded such a bauble, were Terzia not

capable of directing its entire volume of extra-planetary exchange in as narrow a focus as it desired.

The Terzia seated herself in the chair. She touched the light to end its pulsing and to activate the

projection circuits of the device. Her garment swirled as she moved. The fabric appeared to be layers of

diaphanous gauze, gathered and pinned at the shoulders by crystalline brooches. In fact, the layers were

sheets of light polarized by the crystals, and there was no fabric at all in the ensemble.

An image was beginning to form in the alcove across from the chair, just as a more-than-physical

simulacrum of the Terzia would be awakening in the caller's unit, parsecs or kiloparsecs away. The

Stadtler Device could not be used to receive alone. Its principle, whatever it was, required balance: a

biological intellect at either node of a communication.

It did not require a human intellect. That was why the link worked as well for the Terzia as it could have

worked for the human she counterfeited.

A woman on a couch like the Terzia's own gazed from the alcove. The soft focus of the caller's form

sharpened as the electronic cabinets, the room, and the world beyond the room blurred and

disappeared. The universe of the moment had shrunk to a pair of facing couches and the females upon

them.

The caller was shorter than the Terzia and dressed in a soft, one-piece garment. She leaned forward and

said, "I am Life Baron Margritte Pritchard." That rank flowed from Margritte's duties as Minister of

State for Communication. "I speak with the authorization of President Hammer and the State of

Friesland. This is a matter of highest importance, both to our world and to your own. The information

you are about to receive must be forwarded for immediate response by your chief executive."

The Terzia's hair was a rich brown, falling in waves to her upper back. It rippled as she nodded. "I am

the chief executive of Terzia."

The statement was true in a way that only the Stadtler Device made possible. In the field of the

communications unit, there was a being called the Terzia who was separate from all other beings on the

planet. Separate from the being thatwas all other life on the planet. The Terzia's face had been modeled

on a fine-boned hybrid of French and Southern Oriental. It began to glow with the arrogance of

individuality.

Visual and auditory contact had been complete almost immediately. The two personalities, those of

Margritte and the Terzia, were still integrating. That process would continue, had to continue, throughout

the communication to prevent the link from breaking up into static and sheets of color. For the moment,

however, all Margritte was aware of was the fact that Terzia's ruler acted as her own communications

officer. That was not an uncommon circumstance for the few who could afford a Stadtler Device. "There

is a man being held on your planet," Margritte said. "You must release him immediately or risk the anger

of—" she paused "—of Colonel Alois Hammer. The man's name is Donald Slade of Tethys."

The Terzia had known what must be coming. The name was still a numbing blow. Like a spark in her

mind popped an image of Don Slade, back from the field. His gun lay on the table by the door. It was

safe, with its magazine ejected beside it, but it had not been cleaned and put up until other

business had been attended to. Slade's black hair was long enough to wave as his head tossed

with his laughter. His shirt lay in the hallway and he was stepping out of his trousers. The blaze of

his smile and personality flooded the Terzia watching him from the bed.

The Stadtler Field was momentarily a bloom of mauve static. Then it was peopled by entities whose

mutual sharpness was beyond their own self-knowledge. Both minds had recoiled for an instant, then

merged. The memory that had flashed into Margritte's mind was nearly identical to that of the Terzia.A

younger Don Slade, a shell crater and not a luxurious bed-chamber; a uniform spattered with the

blood of the corpse at the crater's lip. But the same laughter and the same fiery intensity . . . and

the same sinewy hands loosing the trouser fly. "Oh dear Lord," Margritte whispered. "Oh Danny."

She looked at the Terzia, seeing and being seen as never before.

"So that is why you want him back," said the alien with human features and a bitter human smile.

"Reasons of state."

"No!" Margritte shouted, angry and cold with a lower-brain fear. Intellectually she knew that the Stadtler

Device was proof against eavesdropping. Nothing which did not merge with the field could withdraw

information from it after the link was established. What she did not herself report would not exist to

Hammer; or to her husband. But certain reflexes are much older than the human intellect. "It was only

once, under fire. It didn't mean anything, except that we were alive."

"Yes, alive," the Terzia agreed. She would have stood and paced if the logic of the Stadtler Device had

permitted it. Instead, images of Don Slade wandered around the edges of the field, visible to both

communicators.

The big man walked along the jungle edge beside the tender on which he had arrived. He had a

pair of imaging goggles, but they were pushed high on his forehead. With his lips pursed, Slade

was trying to duplicate the notes of something that had called to him from the undergrowth. The

song hung in the Stadtler Field. It was not sound but the shadow of a memory.

In a second ghost-like moment, Don Slade was making love to one of the members of his work gang, a

girl with bright eyes and skin the color of oak bark. They were all Terzia, all objects tailored to the needs

of the planet in a universe over which humans swarmed with their mechanical responses to questions and

their violence toward threats and toward excessive strangeness. The autochthones were a part of

Terzia's defense system. So were the plants that produced complex drugs in wild profusion. And so was

the "human" mistress of the world; the Terzia, who dealt with human traders and who controlled the

hardware which kept less peaceful wanderers at a distance.The image of the man astride the alien

girl shouted with joy as unexpected muscles clamped. It showed a delight which the

merely-human exoticism of the Terzia had not aroused in him for many months; and which itself

had soon palled into despondency.

The third image which flickered and trailed the others into the neutral background was that of the present

morning, Slade leaping the thrashing carnivore to save a laborer who was not a man. To Terzia, the

workman was no more than a skin cell, a fleck of spittle voided during a charade. To the man putting

himself at risk, the victim was his responsibility . . . and even if someone had told him the truth, he might

have reacted with the same furious determination, because his duty was not a matter over which Don

Slade gave power to any other to determine.

The Frisian and the Terzia—the women—were alone again.

Margritte tongued her upper lip, dry with tension. She said, "You have to release Don Slade. We order

it."

"Do you think he's kept in a cage?" the Terzia blazed. "He haseverything, luxury, excitement—love,

damn you, love if you will, for a soul like a jewel in the sunshine!" She paused and added in a whisper, "I

am very old, and that is . . . useful to me."

"Bring Don Slade here," Margritte said. "Put him on line with me. Have him tell me himself that he

doesn't see the bars."

The Terzia tossed her head as if the wash of her lustrous hair could wipe away the words she was

hearing. Margritte continued inexorably, "Or else let him go, lady. You have no other choice."

"Do you think you could take him from me?" the Terzia demanded. Her voice and bearing were those of

the arrogant queen whose whim made the planet a danger spot for roistering spacers, a world whose

profits barely balanced the harsh justice of its ruler. On the edge of the Stadtler Field flashed gunpits.

They were armed with high-intensity weapons that could rip a ship from orbit or scar the face of a moon.

Margritte Pritchard's eyes were as cold as her smile. "Do you think," she said, "that Hammer's Slammers

haven't dropped on a hot landing zone before?"The Stadtler Field went black and red and saffron.

Through it all spiked the blazing cyan of powerguns. Landing craft sprayed the perimeter from

their gun tubs as the blunt iridium bows of tanks slid through cargo doors to hunt in a burning

city.

"That was M Company clearing an LZ on Cronenbourg," said Margritte's voice through the flashing

darkness. "Don Slade was in the lead tank." Then she added, "Our panzers will bring him out of here

alive, lady. Or they will sear this world to glass. I swear it, and Colonel Hammer swears it."

Tears were a human thing, but the Terzia was almost fully human as the Hell-lit carnage cleared.

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摘要：

CrosstheStarsbyDavidDrakeThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright(c)1984byDavidDrakeAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBookBaenPublishingEnte...

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David Drake - Cross The Stars

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