Voyage Across the Stars by David Drake Page B

sacks of vegetables and flour or legumes. They worked without expertise, but they seemed to be in good health. The locals glanced at Slade as he walked past, but their attention was primarily focused on their task. No one spoke. The tanker half expected to see roots trailing back into the dwelling, but there was nothing of the sort. All the locals bore the puckered scars of the sorm tree, but they were free now and functioning normally.
    Slade walked faster. “He took her to the topmast high,” trembled the words in his mind. “To see what she could see.”
    Slade was whistling through his teeth, but the result would have been a monotone to anyone not inside his mind as well. “He sunk the ship in a flash of fire,” snarled the ballad to its conclusion. “To the bottom of the sea!”
    Three soldiers stumbled out of a doorway ahead of Slade. They were blinking in the sunlight. Two of them dabbed at the backs of their necks. “You don’t know, Donnie-boy,” said one of that pair.
    Slade jumped, but the third outlaw was the subject of the address, not the tanker who stood unnoticed as the others approached. “The most beautiful girl in the world could lie there with her legs spread, and it wouldn’t be as good.”
    “Listen!” snapped the third soldier, “I watched that thing poking into you. It ain’t natural.”
    “Never put anything in a vein yourself, Donnie?” asked the other of the pair who had tried the sorm trees. Then the outlaw bumped into Slade, although the tanker had flattened himself against a building to give the others more room.
    Instead of the curse and violence Slade had bunched his fists to respond to, the outlaw patted the bigger man on the chest. “Scuse, brother,” the fellow said as he stepped around the human obstruction. Not only had the outlaw himself responded mildly, he seemed to have forgotten that such a collision on a liberty night could bring a savage reaction from the other party.
    “But I don’t care, man,” the outlaw was saying as the three of them continued on their way. His fingers had spread blood in roseates across his neck, but there was no real damage, nothing an injection might not have left. “You’re chicken, but it doesn’t hurt anybody but you. And you’ll never know how much you’re pissing away. . . .”
    Slade cursed, very softly. Then he stepped into the building the three soldiers had just left.
    The interior was much like that of the first dive Slade had entered, though the greeter here was male. “Good day, sir,” the local said from his chair. “How can we help you?”
    The automated bar in this entry lounge was unoccupied. Slade had been concerned that the hundreds of outlaws would overwhelm Toler with consequent disaster, but the cribs and dives were in adequate supply. What they did in the long intervals between landings was another question. For that matter, most freighters would have a score or fewer crewmen. Only fifteen of GAC 59’s complement were actually Levine’s men. “Stim cones?” Slade asked through dry lips.
    The greeter shrugged. “Sorry, not on Toler,” he said. He gestured to the bar. “There’s alcohol, of course. And the sorm.”
    “Yeah,” said the tanker. He opened the right-hand door and entered the sorm parlor he had expected to find there. “I’m not a coward,” he said, but the sounds Slade’s lips and tongue formed were too soft for even the speaker to hear them.
    “Yes, sir?” said a local, one of the two men within the good-sized room. The other man wore ship’s coveralls. Blaney, Slade thought his name was, one of the drive operators. The man lay on one of six narrow couches. He was flaccid except for rhythmic shudders moving from his torso to his extremities.
    “He’s all right?” the tanker asked. His finger traced the path of undulations. Slade was trying desperately to keep his voice normal.
    “Certainly,” said the attendant without a sneer or condescension. He was changing the covering