Free Voyage Across the Stars by David Drake Page A

not only beneath their weight but by meeting their bodies at comfortable angles. The feet of those walking to places to sit did not affect the floor in any visible manner.
    But it was the walls that made Slade pause just inside the doorway. They held his attention in growing horror. The covering material had its own light as had that of the air car garage. This time the wall was not a wash of blank color but rather a mural painting with life and depth and movement.
    “It’s a scene from our history,” Nan said with quiet dignity. “Our ancestors were slow-ship colonists. There was a higher level of radiation aboard than the designers had allowed for, or perhaps they just failed to allow for the passage of time on a closed system. There was, at the end, fighting between our ancestors and other passengers who had—deviated further from the original stock.”
    More than Slade’s eyes were absorbed. He could not have seen the objects on the black background more clearly: rusty iron, the golden gleam of a join brazed instead of welded, the silvery polish of the lands against the shadowed grooves of a gun barrel. To another man, they would have been crude steel boxes, crawling their way one at a time through narrow darkness. But Slade was a tanker. His palms sweated and his heart began to race. “No,” he whispered. It was not only other men in those tanks, it was him again.
    The lead vehicle disintegrated. There was a spark on the glacis, then a globe of orange fire. Fuel and ammunition had exploded. For that brief instant, the surroundings were more than hints in shadow: girders interlacing, reaching far beyond visibility. Nowhere in sight was there a longitudinal connection except the catwalk down which the armored boxes struggled.
    “The main drive was in East Section,” Nan was saying. All the others who had dined with Slade were now seated on the floor. “For generations, our ancestors had used auxilliary units in West for power, but at the end it was necessary to tap the main drive.”
    The next vehicle clumsily shoved aside the remains of the first. Glowing fragments slipped over the edge of the catwalk and pirouetted, as softly as thistle seeds, toward the black that swallowed them and their warmth. Flashes lighted slots in the bulkhead at the walk’s far end. Projectiles rang and splashed from girders, from the walkway, from the armored targets waddling forward.
    “You can’t just bull your way in!” Slade said. “Not if they’re waiting, not if they’re hardened and you give them time to pick and—”
    The leading vehicle had been firing toward its goal with three automatic weapons. Now a pale amber beam threaded through the girders at an angle and touched the vehicle’s flank.
    “—choose, it’s—”
    Another orange explosion.
    “—suicide!”
    “There was no choice,” the Elysian said. Her firm hands held one of Slade’s to keep the castaway from gouging himself with his cropped nails. “There was only one vehicular connection between East Section and West. The crews knew what they were doing.”
    The third vehicle might have been lighter than its fellows, or perhaps even machinery could feel and react to desperation. The tank rocked through the wreckage at speed. The laser touched it but did not bite out the vehicle’s heart. The beam left only a scar that glowed white, then red, as it cooled. As the tank neared its goal, the guns in the bulkhead fired at an increasing deflection. Shots still hit. The weapons replying from the vehicle’s bow fell silent. But there were not so many hits, and they did not have the seam-splitting accuracy of moments before.
    “At the time this was going on—” Nan continued. A white flash beneath the lumbering vehicle scattered the three iron road-wheels on the left side. They spun off the catwalk as the tank lurched the other way. Their edges glowed and disappeared.
    “—a team was entering the power room from outside, unnoticed by the inhabitants who