The Centauri Device (19 page)

Grishkin had found a way to break the Centauri blockade, confront the Device with the man who could operate it: but wherever Truck went, Gaw and ben Barka could never be very far behind. They were locked onto him and to each other in the excesses of their dance, compelled to lift their legs and laugh and sweat. He wouldn't have a hope if he answered the priest's summons, they'd be after him like dogs: yet he owed Grishkin for his humiliation on Stomach — he owed ben Barka for his scorched face — be owed
someone
for the deaths of Angina Seng and Sinclair Pater and every single spacer whose flesh had been frozen to the streets of Avernus.

He got up and paced about. It was completely dark, but he didn't dare put the lights on in case the place was being observed.

He shrugged.

He decided to go to Centauri anyway.

Perhaps the Device was calling subtly to its inheritor, perhaps he honestly wanted a confrontation. Certainly, as he slipped out onto the bitter streets of the port, black and ragged in his cloak like a wounded crow, he wanted revenge; by the time he'd passed the high wire fence of the landing field, he had convinced himself that his anger was more than personal; and he believed as he strode between the rocket pits under the white arc lights that the time for passive misery and acceptance was over.

It wasn't.

When he located the
Ella Speed
(he'd somehow forgotten the paint job and the new name), he found her loading ramp extended tike the tongue of an immense mechanical mouth.

Fix the bos'n was lying huddled up on it.

He was dead.

His lips peeled back from those sawmill teeth, he was curled foetally round a massive abdominal wound, as if his final horrified act had been an attempt to contain the several pints of fluid congealing on the diamond tread of the ramp beneath him. His eyes were narrowed, his fingers were all in a knot; under the port arcs, his features were composed of precise white planes and cold shadows, a brutal, quite alien morphology of emotion, memoir of a hard death.

Truck (down on his knees again, with his hands in the bos'n's blood and his mind on the corpse boats of Cor Caroli, where, under the same clinical illumination, there was at least a little peace, an order to the serried rows) heaved and retched. He wiped himself on Fix's yellow jerkin, coughing dismally. ('A pumpkin,' he explained, 'is what your head is. Don't forget, no vegetable seeds.') Since their government is semi-feudal, Chromians acquire early a deep familiarity with death, but: Oh, you poor sod, he thought, you poor little sod. This was nothing like the loss of Pater, whom he'd hardly known; or of Angina Seng, who hadn't died alone under bleak lights.

Images of Fix: mafeking across the Galaxy in search of freedom and dope and big Denebian whores, his grinning mouth hungry to eat it all down; shivering and blinking on the steps of courthouses in the morning, wondering where to go next after being busted and spending the night telling weird Chromian jokes (' — and were they tits? Not on your life. Intellectual melons!,' with nobody among the soreheaded jailed losers knowing quite how to laugh at this hick who found everything new they thought was old); Fix horrible in trashcan alley fights, the morals of a goat, vital,
alive
— dead.

'What can I do?' whispered Truck, cupping the back of the great round head in his hands.

He couldn't even bring himself to close the eyelids. He got up. Someone was going to be killed. He gazed speculatively along the length of the boat toward the command bridge, then went inside.

My Ella Speed
, a light haulage vehicle of the 'Transit' class, registered out of Carter's Snort, Earth, and licensed to transfer up to one thousand tons of freight over distances less than a thousand light years: she mounted three Dynaflow converters (each outputting about fifty/gigaton hours per every half ton of fuel consumed) and a 'Powerslide' rocket pile for sub-Dyne maneuvers such as planetfall; her cramped little hold had carried everything from neat nitromethane for the curious engines of Anywhere to five thousand live ferrets genetically modified to survive the curious atmosphere of Titus-Bode. Now, except for a few string-tied bundles of 'Some Words of Plain Good Sense in a Time of Trouble,' it was empty and hollow, amplifying the scrape of John Truck's bootsoles as he rifled Fix the bos'n's belongings in search of a gun.

He padded forward through that sweet and dirty ship. In the engine room, where instrumentation flickered and clicked and the display board said
power down
in arrays of colored lights, Fix had left himself a final note: CLENE HTE RUNIN GEER. Truck screwed it up and chucked it on the floor without so much as a smile. He put his shoulder against the command-cabin hatch and shoved. It was locked. Temper gone, he tried to kick it in and was rewarded by Tiny Skeffern's voice from the other side.

'Truck, there's some mad sod in here with a gun.' He sounded muffled and distant Truck said nothing. Damn him for being in the way. A scuffling sound. 'He says hell shoot if you don't come in quietly. I think he means it.'

'Oh,
Hell
' Poor old Tiny. 'All right then.' The electronic lock hummed and chimed, the hatch slid open. Truck dropped Fix's chopper, and the sound clattered back along the sub-frame of the boat like a laugh. 'I'll get you, you bastard,' he said, holding out his hands to demonstrate their emptiness.

Tiny had got himself backed up into a comer, his hands well above his head, small beads of sweat on his bald patch. A shallow laceration with bruised edges ran down his left cheek.

He looked accusingly at Truck and complained, 'I don't think much of your friends.' Track moved a bit further into the cabin, to discover Colonel Gadaffi ben Barka lounging against the approach-radar board with an arid smile on his thin lips.

'Don't think that'll help you when the time comes,' Truck told nun, nodding at the military issue Chambers gun that had lately blown such a large hole in Fix the bos'n's insides. 'I owe you for all this, ben Barka. Nobody threatens me on my own boat'

The Arab shrugged elegantly. He had crossed one leg over the other, his whole body unconsciously mimicking the feral repose of his own death commandos. His uniform was as neat as a pin. But he looked tired, and the desert, never very far away, was etching at his brain.

'You shot my bos'n,' Truck insisted.

Ben Barka's soft brown eyes hooded themselves for a heartbeat. He seemed to be studying his pistol. 'You can't think I'm unaware of that, Captain. Neither are
you
aware of how much is at stake. You did plenty of killing last night.' Another oasis choked to death in the long, empty night. 'He attacked me after fair warning. He was very brave. Do you think I did it lightly? I'm sorry if you do.'

John Truck had found Fix the dwarf washed up in the port hinterland of Gloam — disoriented and illiterate among the hustlers and prostitutes, having no real understanding of the twilight subculture that had swallowed him after his escape from the rural manors and squirearchies of Chrome. The two-thousand light-year brawl that had followed was Truck's responsibility; so was its end, down there under the arc lamps of Avernus. Like Annie Truck, Fix was a dependent.

'Are you apologizing to me? I didn't own him. Apologize to him!'

'Come, Captain — '

'I'm going to kick you to death some day, you bastard.'

The desert shifted, rustled, extended its perimeters: it had made vast inroads since the meeting in the ganger's shed; from being a means, a sympathetic terrain for imaginary revenges, it had mutated into an end. The olive groves had withered, the aqueducts fallen to rubble. Cairo and Alexandria was bleached shells in the ancient sunlight. High up in mountains ben Barka had never seen, exfoliation was cracking rock enough to make a Galactic sand-sea; sand was already spilling from his skull to submerge everything; in peace, he would slip along the wadies of the mind, stalking Reality's pitiful little punitive expeditions —

He made a small gesture with the pistol. 'If you'll take your place at the controls, Captain Truck. Your vessel has been commandeered.' His teeth were like bones exposed by the dry winds. 'Mr Skeffern, you'll note, is still alive and well.'

'Get your backside off the switchgear if you want the boat to go anywhere, ben Barka.'

The command-cabin of a Transit class hauler is laid out with dual controls and duplicated navigational aids; two acceleration chairs provide access to these, and a third can be brought up on runners from the rear of the bridge and locked abreast of the other two. It is a habit of transport pilots to leave this one permanently in place: ben Barka sat himself down in it and indicated that Truck and Tiny should strap-in either side of him. He put his pistol close to Tiny's ear.

'I think you were going my way anyway, Captain. We might as well travel together.'

'Oh yes?' Truck powered up his controls. 'Where's that?'

Ben Barka sighed and shook his head. 'Captain, Captain. The pistol's pointing in the wrong direction for obliquity.' He smiled down at Tiny, who hunched his shoulders like a nomad in a sandstorm. 'Grishkin, that impatient priest, had it from normally reliable sources that today had been chosen for an Arab attempt on the IWG blockade of Centauri VII (there is in fact an action in progress there: it's significant enough to keep IWG fully occupied, but hardly planned to be an actual military success).

'He realized almost immediately that he could never wish for a better diversion: with the result that you, Captain, received an
en clair
message from him early this morning. (It was couched, I felt, in rather fulsome tones even for a priest.) He expects your landing to go quite unobserved by either myself or the good General Gaw. He may even be down there already, waiting for you — one of our ships reported a boat in Opener livery sneaking a shade ineptly past the perimeters of the engagement some two hours ago.

'It was me who leaked the information to his pathetic intelligence machine: they'd never have got it without help, I don't wonder he didn't bother to code the message. Half his people are working for me or the General anyway. There you have it: we're going to the same place, Captain, We always were.'

Truck engaged a bank of rocker switches below the engine-room repeaters and warmed up the Powerslide pile for take-off, wondering just how much allowance ben Barka had made for Grishkin's fanaticism and the General's not inconsiderable cunning.

'Be it on your own head, Colonel.'

My Ella Speed
rumbled and shook. The cargo ramp pulled itself in slowly, tipping Fix the bos'n into the hold like a bale of fresh animal skins. Truck got a go-ahead from the Port Authority, giving his destination as Sad al Bari and his cargo as 'mining machinery.' Two massive, caterpillar-tracked LTOA vehicles moved in across the dock and stood the boat gently on her tail. He checked that Tiny's controls were shut down, worked the rocket engines through the pre-lift part of their power-curve a couple of times.

'I can go any tune you want, Colonel.'

'Do it.'

My Ella Speed
, well into the spirit of the thing, wiggled along her length like a bitch in heat, and threw herself upward.

While the colossal cruisers of UASR(N) have so-called 'autonomic gravity' environments which protect their crews against the devastating G effects of a battle maneuver, third-hand Transit class haulers do not. They are safe from inertia only during dyne-field shifts; and
My
Ella Speed
, lustily fighting the attractions of Avernus, made it from relative rest to escape speed in a very short time indeed.

The multi-G blast is a concomitant of the spacer's way of life: Truck and Tiny, who had been lifting like that since birth — and before — took it stoically, with G standing on their faces and stumping all over their ribs.

But ben Barka was used to a more generous kind of travel. Perhaps he simply forgot.

Certainly, it was too late when he remembered.

He dropped his Chambers gun when they were about a mile up. He tried comically to move his arms from his sides, sweat breaking out all over his face. His eyes rolled and protruded as Truck poured it relentlessly on. He gasped for breath; his skull snapped back against the head-restraint: when he tried to shift it, Truck — feeling somewhat wilted himself — made a vast effort, steered his hand the full two inches from armrest to controls, and let it fall against the emergency thrust button.

My Ella Speed
howled and quaked. Ben Barka made a choked, surprised sort of sound. His eyes opened wide; suddenly, a dark thin trickle of blood issued sluggishly from his left nostril. His tongue poked out from under his mustache like a misshapen fig. He passed out.

Captain John Truck, a haulage man from way back, who, in the dark womb of Annie Truck, had come down the infamous Carling Line in an unguided drone that was little more than a high-G tin can with refrigeration, held it until Tiny Skeffern was unconscious too, just to make sure. Then he settled into a parking orbit, said, 'Never mess with a pro on his own ground, Colonel,' and began to run checks on
Ella
's misused hull. He'd been in tougher lifts.

Egerton's Port got on to him by radio and wanted to know just what the boy-wonder Rocket Ace in the clapped-out Transit thought he was up to.

He grinned. 'Sorry about that,' he told them. 'Wrong switch.' Horse laughs all around.

A few minutes later, Tiny woke up and unstrapped himself. 'That was a bit bloody hairy,'

he complained. He saw ben Barka. 'Oh-ho!' he said. 'Can I shoot him?' he asked, getting hold of the pistol, which had fallen down the side of his seat, and waving it carefully around.

'No, I'm going to put him out of the rear lock without a suit. It's something I just thought of,' said Truck proudly. 'He'll look good, going down on the night side. It's quite artistic, really.'

Modesty, modesty.

Tiny examined ben Barka's congested face. 'You hit me,' he said coldly. He reached out and wiped the barrel of the Chambers gun down the Arab's cheek. 'Go on, Truck,' he said, 'let me shoot him, eh?' He grinned ingratiatingly.