STARLINER by David Drake

Someone switched off the Empress’s external lighting.

“Down!” cried Wanda Holly as she rose from the edge of a shanty behind the circle of Szgranians. She pointed a broad-mouthed weapon.

Ran jumped off the end of the palanquin, putting himself as far as he could from Rawsl and the warrior who’d approached to prod him forward. Intense light hammered through Ran’s closed lids and the flesh of the forearm he’d thrown across his eyes.

Szgranians screamed. Swords dashed together, and a warrior emptied his automatic rifle in a single long burst. It was God’s own mercy that one or more of the plasma weapons didn’t belch nuclear hell as well.

The throbbing pulses stopped. Ran was flat on the ground, though he didn’t remember hitting it. Szgranians sobbed and bellowed.

“C’mon, c’mon!” Wanda shouted. Her right hand gripped Ran’s arm to guide him as he stumbled to his feet.

She wore the padded, dull-colored overgarment of a Szgranian commoner. She wouldn’t pass for a local if anyone looked carefully—but no Szgranian of rank would look carefully at a commoner.

The nerve gun and powerpack slung to Wanda’s breast weighed forty kilos. Ran didn’t see how she could carry it and move so quickly. The weapon projected light pulsing at critical neural frequencies. These differed for various species—for humans and the great apes, it was just under seven and a half Hertz—but at some frequency, any chemically-based nervous system could be stimulated to dump neurotransmitters wildly.

Hundreds of Szgranians, many of them armed, had gone simultaneously psychotic. Most of them still writhed on the ground, their limbs locked into pretzel shapes that might mean broken bones. One warrior chuckled as he stabbed himself repeatedly in the abdomen. His daggers pumped in sequence like the pistons of a reciprocating engine.

The Szgranians facing the Empress hadn’t been spared either, because the light had reflected from the starliner’s gleaming hull. An arc of servants sprawled where bullets had cut them down, and a warrior was pounding his own feet to pulp with the heavy tube of his plasma discharger.

“You were waiting here?” Ran gasped. He’d scraped the hell out of his right palm and elbow. They felt cool from oozing blood.

Wanda’s face was a mirrored ball. She’d polarized her helmet visor to protect her from her own weapon, even though it was calibrated to the slightly higher critical frequency of the Szgranian physiology.

“Don’t be a damned fool!” she snapped. “I waited for you at the gate of the palace. You didn’t think I’d let you get into something like that without backup, did you?”

Commander Kneale and the two ratings from Ran’s own watch grabbed the pair of them and helped them up the gangway. The submachine guns the three men carried clattered against one another and Wanda’s nerve gun.

“No,” Ran mumbled. “I don’t guess you would have.”

It was good to have friends.

TELLICHERY

Carnatica Port was a large, bustling and cosmopolitan city. The last point was underscored by the number of cases of beef, relabeled Calicheman mutton, which had been unloaded from the Empress’s holds and trucked past Hindu temples whose courtyards abutted the spaceport. So long as lip service was paid to the planet-wide dietary laws, the business class which controlled Carnatica was willing to wink at foreign tastes—and to share them, it was whispered.

The Trident Starlines offices filled the top three floors of a building just outside the spaceport reservation, overlooking both the port and the town. Commander Hiram Kneale stood on the palm-shaded roof garden. He was checking the Empress’s manifest with a hand-held reader linked to the main unit beneath him instead of using a fixed terminal.

A modern office building and a starliner both cut their occupants off from their surroundings. In the case of the starship, enclosure was a necessity. When Kneale was dirtside, however, he preferred to work in a more open environment.

In the street below, electric-powered jitneys crawled through streams of pedestrians without the noise and hostility an observer would note in most cultures. Across the chain-link fence and alarm wires which surrounded the reservation, vans replenished stocks of tangibles aboard the Empress of Earth and more jitneys arrived with passengers and their luggage.

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