Voyage Across the Stars by David Drake Page B

visitors” was an understatement. “It’s not in your charts,” the Terzia had said of this Elysium, and Slade had no reason to believe that she was wrong.
    Certainly the cursory navigational data supplied with the lifeboat did not mention the place. The girls’ eyes made Slade feel something like a side of meat, but he had at least the consolation that it was pretty good meat.
    Slade was past his first youth, but he had no inclination to have become inactive. He had seen too many line officers leave a tank turret for a desk and go to seed with appalling suddenness. Slade’s build would permit that if he let it, the great ropes of muscle growing marbled with fat, the hard belly beginning to sag to match the wobbling buttocks. The tan of Terzia’s sun had faded somewhat during the voyage, but improvised exercise had kept up the muscle tone of his big body. Sare’s estimate of his weight was short by five kilos, perhaps because so much of Slade’s bulk was dense muscle.
    Also . . . early in his service with the Slammers, before a former nickname had resurfaced, Slade had been known as “Tripod.” He knew quite well that in love-making, as in any other craft, the workman’s skill is more important than his tool. From the way their eyes flickered to Slade’s groin, it seemed that these girls were not aware of that as yet.
    “Well, I think we’d better get back,” Risa said. “If you wouldn’t mind, sir, we’ll trim better if you sit sideways in the luggage space instead of in the other seat. I’m afraid you’ll have to put your knees up.”
    Risa was leading the way to the open car. She stretched back an index finger as if to draw Slade physically along. The other three girls scattered at once to their own vehicles. All of them were landed neatly beside the collapsed parachute. The chute’s monomolecular fabric should have been of interest to locals who seemed to wear no synthetics. The girls scampered over the canopy without a glance down, and Slade knew enough to doubt their disinterest stemmed from ignorance.
    The hull of Risa’s car was molded in pastel swirls. The pattern was not quite garish up close, and at any distance it would mute into a blur more natural than any equal expanse of a solid color could be. The meadow’s vegetation was more varied than the screens could suggest, but only an occasional stalk was more than a meter high. There were no thorns to jab Slade’s legs or bare feet.
    The car was little more than two seats and, behind them, a cargo space narrow enough to be a strait fit for Slade’s chest sideways. “Lord and Martyrs,” he exclaimed as he seated himself gingerly. “You dived this at two hundred kays?”
    “We had to,” said Risa, hopping into the driver’s seat. “Nobody else was anywhere around, and we couldn’t just let you fall.”
    The car staggered a little on a sliding lift-off, but its fans had a surprising amount of power for an open vehicle. Risa trimmed them manually at three meters, then slipped upward to ten where there was a better view of the rolling landscape.
    The planet was not entirely open meadow as Slade’s subconscious had been trying to convince him. Mountains were now visible astern in the near distance, and the broad band of darker green to the left was surely a forest fringing a watercourse. In addition, mixed herds of animals, none of them familiar to Slade, cropped the vegetation. Occasionally, the whine of fan blades or the shadow of one of the cars flitting above would spook a whole section of the plain. Hundreds of beasts, the largest species up to half the size of the lifeboat, would rush off across the sward like dark surf. They showed no signs of being domesticated.
    It was a matter of increasing concern to Slade that, apart from the cars, there were no signs of civilization at all.
    “You settled here recently?” he asked. That would explain both the low population and the Terzia’s remark about the planet being uncharted.
    The