Voyage Across the Stars by David Drake Page A

occasional glimpse of carousing outlaws on the way from one entertainment to another. Via, Slade had been on enough strange worlds not to get nervous about docking in on some backwater. He was a man, a human being, whether or not he had the hundred and seventy tonnes of a panzer wrapped around him.
    He began whistling under his breath; not a full song, just catches from a tune that had been old when space travel was a dream. He began to walk toward the sprawling settlement.
    “If I was to leave my husband dear
    And my two babes also. . . .”
    Slade did not carry a weapon, not a hidden knife, not the pistol that had been part of his clothing during twenty years of service.
    “Oh, what have you to take me to,
    If I with you should go?”
    The individual houses were as regular as could be maintained with the differing levels of skill with which they had been constructed. The streets which connected—and indeed, separated—the blank house walls seemed to be more what remained of the area when the building went up on it than part of a plan. Each of the buildings had a single outer door. There was nothing Slade could recognize as advertising or even identification, but all the buildings with an open door were devoted at least in part to the desires of the men who had just landed.
    The tanker stepped into a house at random. The room beyond the arched doorway was dim. It felt less dry than the outside. There was a bar to the left where two mercenaries drank. Why they wanted to pay for something the ship offered free was beyond Slade. The door leading to the right was ajar, but the big man could hear nothing meaningful from beyond.
    “Yes sir?” said the woman in the armchair facing the outside door. There was a glow-strip on the wall beside her, but it was faint enough that Slade could not be sure whether her hair was blond or brown or a pale, friendly russet. “Whatever’s your pleasure, we have it. And the first touch of sorm is on the house.” She gestured easily toward the door to Slade’s right.
    The outlaws at the bar shifted abruptly. They strode down the hall to the left and out of sight around one of the internal corners.
    “There’s women?” Slade asked. He was rubbing his fists in recollection and present discomfort.
    “Of course,” said the greeter. She stood up. Her age was as indeterminate as the color of her hair. She was no longer young, but the body she displayed as she raised her patterned smock was firm and attractive. Because her breasts had been small to begin with, they had not sagged noticeably with age. Her belly twitched with a shudder of ecstacy; faked, no doubt, but—
    “Lord!” Slade blurted. There was a wire from the wall to the back of the woman’s neck. Not a wire, a tendril, the sorm the official had talked about.
    “The root bothers you?” the greeter asked without concern. “It’s not necessary.” She tossed her head forward. Her hair was indeed russet. The shudder that wracked her body for an instant now was neither ecstatic nor counterfeit. But it was brief, and the smile was back on the woman’s face even as the tendril subsided to the wall through which it grew. Slade noticed, however, the change in the woman’s nipples. They had been as erect as bullet noses. Now they were relaxing almost as suddenly as the root had dropped away from the woman’s spine.
    “You’re a strong man,” she said. She stepped toward the tanker with the front of her dress still lifted to shoulder height. “Your children would have fine, sharp minds, too, wouldn’t they?”
    “Maybe another time,” said Slade. He dodged back into the sunlight. He was furious with his body because it insisted on shivering for several more minutes.
     
    A heavy air-cushion truck was grumbling down the street. It was almost the first vehicle Slade had seen on Toler. It pulled up beside one of the closed buildings.
    The building’s door opened. People from within joined the two men on the truck in unloading