“And I cannot let go,” Lermontov said. He punched viciously at the console controls and Tanith faded from the screen. Earth, bluer and to Lermontov far more lovely, swam out of the momentary blackness. “They are fools down there,” Sergei Lermontov muttered. “And we are no better. Martin, I ask myself again and again, why can we not control—anything? Why are we caught like chips in a rushing stream? Men can guide their destinies. I know that. So why are we so helpless?”
“You don’t ask yourself more often than I do,” Senator Grant said. His voice was low and weary. “At least we still try. Hell, you’ve got more power than I have. You’ve got the Fleet, and you’ve got the secret funds you get from Tanith—Christ, Sergei, if you can’t do something with that—”
“I can urinate on fires,” Lermontov said. “And little else.” He shrugged. “So, if that is all I can do, then I will continue to make water. Will you have a drink?”
“Thanks.”
Lermontov went to the sideboard and took out bottles. His conversations with Grand Senator Grant were never heard by anyone else, not even his orderlies who had been with him for years.
“Prosit.”
“Prosit!”
They drank. Grant took out a cigar. “By the way, Sergei, what are you going to do with Falkenberg now that the trouble on Tanith is finished?”
Lermontov smiled coldly. “I was hoping that you would have a solution to that. I have no more funds—”
“The Tanith money—”
“Needed elsewhere, just to keep the Fleet together,” Lermontov said positively.
“Then Falkenberg’ll just have to find his own way. Shouldn’t be any problem, with his reputation,” Grant said. “And even if it is, he’s got no more troubles than we have.”
Prince of Mercenaries
I
Lysander peered down through orange clouds. The ground was invisible, but cloud wisps streaked past, and stress diamonds formed near the wingtips of the landing ship. It was eerily quiet in the passenger cabin. Lysander turned from the viewport to his companion, a young man about twenty and much like himself. “Mach 25, I’d guess,” Lysander said, then caught himself. “Fast. Faster than sound, Harv. A lot faster.”
Harv leaned across to try to look through the port. “I can’t see the ground.”
“We won’t for a while. The book says most of Tanith has clouds all the time. And it’s hot.”
“Oh. I don’t like hot much.” Harv smiled briefly and leaned back in his seat.
The landing ship banked sharply, then banked again. Strange accelerations lifted the more than two hundred passengers from their seats, then slammed them down again. The ship turned, banked, turned again in the opposite direction. Lysander remembered the dry voice of his ground school instructor explaining that delta wing ships lose energy in turns. Lysander had certainly learned that on the flight simulator and later in his practice re-entry landings. He glanced outside. The landing boat had a lot of energy to lose before it could settle on one of Tanith’s protected bays.
A dozen turns later the ship slipped below the cloud cover, and he could see Tanith below.
It didn’t look any different from the veedisk pictures. Green and yellow seas, with inlets jutting far into the bright green of the land areas. Land and sea were mixed together in a crazy quilt.
Harv leaned over to look out. “Looks—looks flat.”
“It is flat. The whole planet.”
“No mountains, Prince?”
“None. Like Earth during the Carboniferous. No mountains, no snow, no glaciers. That’s why it’s hot everywhere.”
“Oh.” Harv strained to see out the port. “Am I in your way?”
“No, it’s all right.” Lysander didn’t really like having Harv lean over him like that, but he would never say so. Harv Middleton would be devastated by any criticism from his prince, Brotherhood or no.
The landing ship streaked over the swamps and lowlands, losing speed at each turn. Finally it banked over a series of hills that rose above an inlet of the sea. The hills were covered with low buildings set in a grid of broad, straight streets. The city was left behind as the ship went beyond and out over the green and yellow sea. Then it turned sharply.
“Taxpayers, we are on final approach to Lederle, the capital city of Tanith. Please keep your seat and shoulder belts securely fastened until we have docked at the landing port. Tovarisches . . .” The message was repeated in Russian, then in several other languages.
They came in over the water. The low ridges that held Lederle and its suburbs rose on their left. The ship settled in closer, then touched down. Spray flew up by the port.
We’re here, Lysander thought. Tanith. The CoDominium prison planet.
* * *
Heat lay over the dock area in moist waves, doubly unpleasant after the air conditioned landing ship. The Customs shed was corrugated iron, manned by three bored workers in grimy white canvass jackets, supervised by a clerk who wore a blue guayabera shirt with CoDominium badges sewed to the epaulettes. The clerk checked identifications carefully, making each passenger stare into a retinal pattern reader, but his subordinates were content with hasty X-ray scans of the baggage.
Makes sense, Lysander thought. What in the name of Dracon would anyone smuggle into Tanith?
The helicopter that waited beyond the Customs shed was an ancient Nissan with an unpleasant tick in the engine. It would hold twenty friendly people. Lysander shamelessly used his rank to get a seat up in the cockpit and left Harv in the rear to deal with the baggage. The pilot wasn’t a lot older than Lysander. He eyed Lysander skeptically, then glanced at the passenger list. “Lysander Collins. They tell me you’re to sit up here with me. You bribed someone. Who?”
Lysander shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“Not a lot, since it wasn’t me. I’m Joe Arabis.” He pulled down a folding seat. “Here, this is the flight inspector’s seat.” Arabis cocked his head to listen to the engine, then laughed. “Not that I ever saw an inspector. Oh, the heck with it, take the left-hand seat, there’s no co-pilot this trip. So. Welcome to Tanith, mate.”
“Thanks.” Lysander sat and strapped himself in. “I’ve heard there are some big critters in the oceans. Big enough to give the landing ships problems?”
Arabis shrugged. “Well, they say the dam the CoDominium put in across the inlet keeps the nessies out. Me, I don’t fly out there any more than I have to.”
Lysander lifted an eyebrow.
“Yeah. Well, mate, if you ever pilot a chopper over the real oceans here, be damned sure you stay thirty meters up. Not twenty, thirty.”
And I can believe as much of that as I want to, Lysander thought. Newcomers are always fair game. Of course sometimes the tallest tales are real. . . . “Thanks.” Lysander pointed to the stub-winged landing ship at the end of the wharf. “Are your nessies really big enough to be a problem for those?”
“That’s sure one reason for the dam,” Arabis said. “Other stuff, too. I wouldn’t want to set one of those shuttles down anywhere but here. Christ, I wouldn’t want to ride a Fleet Marine assault boat down to some random stretch of water on Tanith. Ah. There’s our clearance.”
Arabis gunned the engines and lifted off from the floating dock. In seconds they were a hundred meters about the city. They circled, then headed in a direct line. The diffuse light from the eternal cloud cover cast no real shadows, so that Lysander found it impossible to get his bearings. The compass showed they were flying northwest.
“Looks like rain.” Lysander said.
Arabis glanced upward and shrugged. “It generally does look like rain.” He laughed. “Naturally. It’s generally going to rain. At least there’s no storms coming.”
“Get bad ones?”
“Lots of storms. Also hurricanes like you wouldn’t believe, mate. You ever do any flying here, you damn well check with the weather people early and often. Tanith can brew up a storm in a couple of hours.”
“You do have weather satellites?”
“Sure. And like most stuff on Tanith they work most of the time. The ground net works most of the time, too. And most of the time the convicts they’ve got watching the screens remember to tell somebody, and most of the time the CD clerks remember to broadcast a general alert, and—”
“I see.” Lysander examined the city below. Most buildings here were low, one story, covered with white or pastel stucco and roofed with broad slabs of what seemed to be light-colored rock. The city was laid out in a standard grid, broad streets, some divided with strips planted in fantastic colors and shapes. Most of the buildings were very much alike. Off the major streets there were jumbles of what were no more than shacks built of some kind of wood and roofed with wilting green thatch. Far down past the landing area was what looked like a separate city dominated by a massive concrete building.
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