David Drake - Hammer's Slammers 02 - Cross The Stars

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Cross the Stars
by David Drake
[this book ripped from Baen Free Library. Please go to http://www.baen.com/library/ for more]
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.
Copyright © 1984 by David Drake
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
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 of my 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—and they 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 to us, 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 that was 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 cer-
tain 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 has everything, 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.”
摘要：

CrosstheStarsbyDavidDrake[thisbookrippedfromBaenFreeLibrary.Pleasegotohttp://www.baen.com/library/formore]Thisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1984byDavidDrakeAllrightsreserved,includingth...

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