Free Voyage Across the Stars by David Drake Page B

were concentrating on the bulkhead.”
    A door from somewhere ahead of the disabled vehicle spewed others onto the catwalk. The remaining gun on the tank fired until the barrel shone. Weapons from West Section itself must have joined, because the flecks of projectiles ricochetting patterned the vehicle’s quarter for the first time. It made no difference. The others were over the tank like maggots on the third day’s corpse. They were humanoid, but they had huger bodies and fewer eyes than men. They began to devour the vehicle’s crew even as they dragged them through the prized-open hatches.
    “If they had known, you see,” Nan said as the mural faded to swirls of dark pastel, “they would have cut the connection. The power had to be on for three full days before all the passengers in West Section could escape to Elysium. All the survivors.”
    Slade shuddered to bring himself out of the waste of fear and memory where he had lived for the past moments. Music of some sort was a soothing undercurrent in the hall. Patient, friendly faces were turned up to his. “Dear Lord have mercy,” the tanker said. He released his hand from the woman’s. He managed a smile. “I’m Don Slade,” he said. “I was a merchant. . . .”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    “I think we’ve got a balance,” said the blonde technician. Her voice whispered out to every human on Elysium except for Don Slade. “We’re going to begin coupling in.” Her fingers played over the banks of rocker switches before her.
    “A little up in the thirties, I think,” said her bald companion. The blonde’s fingers replaced a nod. They touched controls and sharpened the color of the images forming in her mind, her companion’s mind, and in those of the other thirteen thousand Elysians with right-brain implants.
    The bald technician rubbed his temples. “Blessed Lord,” he grumbled. “That spike almost took the top off my skull. And just the mural, not something he’d been through himself.”
    “How’s this?” asked the blonde as the images firmed.
    “Perfect,” said her companion. He touched one of his own controls, minusculely changing the attitude of the hidden probe aimed at the back of Slade’s head.
    “I had the controls set down, just cracked enough to get a reading, I thought. Really.”
    “I’m not blaming you,” the bald technician said. He had closed his eyes. “I never knew an affect to peak like that either. I just hope the shunts catch the next spike the way they’re supposed to. Or—” he smiled, covering a wince of remembered pain— “our guest is going to be very surprised when his audience starts to scream just as he gets to the good part.”
    Then the two of them relaxed behind their instruments. With the ease of long experience, they let Don Slade’s words and the thoughts like sharks beneath those words hiss simultaneously through their own minds.
     
    “The ship on which I hired passage,” the speaker was saying, “had a lot of military types aboard. There’d been a lot of fighting on Friesland in the recent past. Hard-cases had signed on with one side or another. Now that things had settled down, they were leaving; and sometimes one step ahead of the White Mice, the authorities. Passes weren’t being checked very carefully. The Colonel—ah, President Hammer, the new executive, seemed to figure that it was as cheap to ship the trash out as it was to cull them and shoot them.
    “Or just shoot them, I guess—” A vivid image of bound figures collapsing against a shot-burned wall; a smile on the speaker’s face that matched the image much better than it did his merchant persona. “I hear that might’ve been discussed before a fellow named Pritchard, close to the President, put his foot down.”
    Elysium watched the men with the uniforms and bearing of military men who filled a small, tense room. Young men in battle-dress stood beside the door. The seated men had the age and rank. They were scowling, several of them