Christopher Stasheff - Warlock 1 - Escape Velocity.pdf

(541 KB) Pobierz
Warlock and Son
Warlock Series
Escape Velocity
Chapter 1
She was a girl. Dar knew it the moment he saw her.
That wasn't as easy as it sounds. Really. Considering that she was shaved bald and was wearing a
baggy gray flannel coverall, Dar was doing pretty well to identify her as human, let alone female.
It would've been a much better bet that she was a department-store mannequin in one of those
bags that are put on them between outfits, to protect them in case somebody with a plastic fetish
comes along.
But she moved. That's how Dar knew she was human.
And he was just in from a six-week trading tour and was just about to go out on another one
(Cholly, the boss, was shorthanded this month; one of his traders had been caught shaving
percentage points with Occam's Razor). Which meant, since the Wolmar natives didn't allow
their womenfolk to meet strangers, that for the last six weeks Dar had seen things that were
human, and things that were female, but never both at the same time; so he was in a prime state to
recognize a girl if one happened along.
This one didn't "happen"-she strode. She nearly swaggered, and she stepped down so hard that
Dar suspected she was fighting to keep her hips from rolling. It sort of went with the gray
jumpsuit, bald head, and lack of makeup.
She sat down on a bar stool, and waited. And waited. And waited.
The reason she waited so long was that Cholly was alone behind the bar today and was discussing
the nature of reality with a corporal; he wasn't about to give up a chance at a soldier.
Not that the girl seemed to mind. She was ostentatiously not looking at the two privates at the
other end of the bar. but her ears fairly twitched in their direction.
"He never had a chance," the gray-haired one burbled around his cigar. "He but scarcely looked
up, and whap! I had him!"
"Took him out good and proper, hey?" The blond grinned.
"Out! I should say! So far out he an't niver coming back! Mark my words, he'll buy the farm! Buy
it for me yet, he will!"
The girl's lips pinched tight, and her throat swelled the way someone's does when they can't hold
it in anymore and it's just got to bust loose; and Dar figured he'd better catch it, 'cause the soldiers
wouldn't understand.
But Dar would. After six weeks without women, he was ready to understand anything, provided
it came from a female.
So he sidled up to lean on the bar, neatly intersecting her line of sight, smiled with all the
sincerity he could dredge up, and chirped, "Service is really slow around here, isn't it?"
She got that blank look of total surprise for a minute; then her lip curled, and she spat, "Yes,
unless you're looking for death! You seem to dish it up awfully fast around here, just because
you're wearing a uniform!"
" 'Uniform'?" Dar looked down at his heavy green coveralls and mackinaw, then glanced over at
the two soldiers, who were looking surprised and thinking about feeling offended. He turned back
to the girl, and said quickly. " 'Fraid I don't follow you, miz. Hasn't been a killing around here all
year."
"Sure," she retorted, "it's January seventh. And what were those two bums over there talking
about, if it wasn't murder?"
She had to point. She just had to. Making sure Dar couldn't pretend she'd been talking about two
CPOs walking by in the street, no doubt. To make it worse, judging by their accents, the two
privates were from New Perth, where "bum" had a very specific meaning that had absolutely
nothing to do with unemployment.
The older private opened his mouth for a bellow, but Dar cut in quicken "Points, miz. You can
believe me or not, but they were talking about points."
She looked doubtful for a fraction of a second, but only a fraction. Then her face firmed up again
with the look of someone who's absolutely sure that she's right, especially if she's wrong. She
demanded, "Why should I believe you? What are you, if you aren't a soldier?"
Dar screwed up his hopes and tried to look casual. "Well, I used to be a pilot ..."
"Am I supposed to be impressed?" she said sourly.
"They told me girls would be, when I enlisted." Dar sighed. "It's got to work sometime."
"I thought this planet was an Army prison."
"It is. The Army has ships too."
"Why?" She frowned. "Doesn't it trust the Navy to do its shipping?"
"Something like that."
"You say that with authority. What kind of ship did you pilot-a barge?"
"A space tug," Dar admitted.
She nodded. "What are you now?"
Dar shrugged, and tried to look meek. "A trader"
"A trader!" She spoke with such gleeful indignation that even Cholly looked up-for a second,
anyway. "So you're one of the vampires who're victimizing the poor, helpless natives!"
"Helpless!" the old private snorted-well, roared, really; and Dar scratched his head and said,
"Um, 'fraid you've got your cables crossed, miz. I wouldn't exactly say who's doing the
victimizing."
"Well, I would!" she stormed. "Stampeding out here, victimizing these poor people, trying to take
over their land and destroy their culture-it's always the same! It's all part of a pattern, a pattern as
old as Cortez, and it just goes on and on and on! 'Don't give a damn what the people want; give
'em technology! Don't give a damn whether or not their religion's perfectly adequate for 'em-give
'em the Bible! Don't ask whether or not they own the place-herd 'em onto reservations! Or make
slaves of 'em!' Oh, I've heard about it, I've read about it! It's just starting here, but you wait and
see! It's genocide, that's what it is! It's the worst kind of imperialism! And all being practiced by
the wonderful, loyal soldiers of our miraculously democratic Interstellar Dominion Electorates!
Imperialists!" And she spat.
The two soldiers swelled up like weather balloons, and the weather was going to be bad, so
Cholly yanked himself out of his talk and hurried down to the end of the bar to put in a soothing
word or two. As he passed Dar, he muttered, "Now, then, lad, whut've I told ye? Reason, don'cha
know, now, Dar, reason! Try it, there's a good fellow, just try it! An' you'll see. Sweet reason,
now, Dar!" And he hurried on down to the end of the bar.
Dar thought he'd been trying reason already, and so far it hadn't been turning out sweetly; but he
took a deep breath, and set himself to try it again. "Now, then, miz. Uh, first off, I'd say we didn't
exactly stampede out here. More like a roundup, actually."
She frowned. "What're you talking about? . . . Oh. You mean because this is a military prison
planet."
"Well, something of that sort, yes."
She shrugged. "Makes no difference. Whether you wanted to come here or not, you're here-and
they're shipping you in by the thousands."
"Well, more like the hundreds, really." Dar scratched behind his ear. "We get in maybe two
hundred, three hundred, ah ..."
"Colonists," she said sternly.
"... prisoners," Dar finished. "Per year Personally, I'd rather think of myself as a 'recruit.'"
"Doesn't make any difference," she snapped. "It's what you do after you get here that counts. You
go out there, making war on those poor, innocent natives . . . and you traders go cheating them
blind. Oh, I've heard what you're up to."
"Oh, you have?" Dar perked up. "Hey, we're gettin' famous! Where'd you hear about us, huh?"
She shrugged impatiently. "What does it matter?"
"A lot, to me. To most of us, for that matter When you're stuck way out here on the fringe of the
Terran Sphere, you start
caring a lot about whether or not people've ever heard about your planet. 'Be nice to feel even that
important."
"Mm." Her face softened a moment, in a thoughtful frown. "Well . . . I'm afraid this won't help
much. I used to be a clerk back on Terra, in the records section of the Bureau of Otherworldly
Activities-and a report about Wolmar came through occasionally."
"Oh." Dar could almost feel himself sag. "Just official reports?"
She nodded, with a vestige of sympathy. "That's right. Nobody ever saw them except bureaucrats.
And the computer, of course."
"Of course." Dar heaved a sigh and straightened his shoulders. "Well! That's better than nothing .
. . I suppose. What'd they say about us?"
"Enough." She smiled vindictively. "Enough so that I know this is a prison planet for criminal
soldiers, governed by a sadomasochistic general; that scarcely a day passes when you don't have
a war going on. . . ."
"Holidays," Dar murmured, "and Sundays."
"'Scarcely,' I said! And that you've got an extremely profitable trade going with the natives for
some sort of vegetable drug, in return for which you give them bits of cut glass and surplus spare
parts that you order through the quartermaster."
"That's all?" Dar asked, crestfallen.
"All!" She stared, scandalized. "Isn't that enough? What did you want-a list of war crimes?"
"Oh . . ." Dar gestured vaguely. "Maybe some of the nice things-like this tavern, and plenty of
leave, and ..."
"Military corruptness. Slackness of discipline." She snorted. "Sure. Maybe if I'd stayed with the
Bureau, a piece of whitewash would've crossed my desk."
"If you'd stayed with them?" Dar looked up. "You're not with BOA anymore?"
She frowned. "If I were working for the Bureau, would I be here?"
Dar just looked at her for a long moment.
Then he shook himself and said, "Miz, the only reason I can think of why you would be here is
because BOA sent you. Who could want to come here?"
"Me," she said, with a sardonic smile. "Use your head. Could I dress like this if I worked for the
government?"
Dar's face went blank. Then he shrugged. "I dunno. Could you?"
"Of course not," she snapped. "I'd have to have a coiffured hairdo, and plaster myself with
skintight see-throughs and spider heels. I had to, for five years."
"Oh. You didn't like it?"
"Would you like to have to display yourself everyday so a crowd of the opposite sex could gawk
at you?"
Dar started a slow grin.
"Well, I didn't!" she snapped, reddening.
"And that's why you quit?"
"More than that," she said grimly. "I got fed up with the whole conformist ragout, so I aced out
instead."
" 'Aced out'?" Dar was totally lost.
"Aced out! Quit! Got out of all of it!" she shouted. "I turned into a Hume\"
"What's a 'Hume'?"
She stared, scandalized. "You really are away from it all out here, aren't you?"
"I've kinda been trying to hint about something along those lines, yes. We get the news whenever
a freighter lands, about three times a year. So until they invent faster-than-light radio, we're not
going to know what's happening on Terra until a couple of years after it's happened."
She shook her head in exasperation. "Talk about primitive! All right ... a Hume is me-a
nonconformist. We wear loose gray coveralls like this to hide our bodies from all those
lascivious, leering eyes. We shave our heads, so we don't have to do up a pompadour everyday.
And we don't submit to those prisons society calls 'jobs'; we'd rather be poor. We've put in our
time, we've got some savings, and between that, our GNP share, and whatever we can pick up at

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin