Starliner(71)

"You assumed that, surely?" the youth said coolly. "I've never claimed that all my fellow-countrymen are saints. We have thieves, have murderers; have kidnappers. All the more reason for me to wish to right this wrong."

"The people who did this," Ran continued deliberately, "are going to think of themselves as patriots. And so will a lot of people back on Grantholm if they learn about it."

Franz shrugged. "Stresemans have never been afraid to support the right," he said. "Even when it was unpopular." He was as matter-of-fact as if he'd been discussing the scarlet sunset.

Ran sighed. It must be nice to be so certain about right and wrong. "Were you able to find me a long gun?" he asked Wanda.

"Sorry," she said. "The armory only has pistols and submachine guns. But we'll be at close range, won't we?"

"Who knows?" Ran said. His palms were beginning to feel cold. Until now, he'd been too focused on each next step to worry. "Yeah, I suppose. Maybe a submachine gun, that'll be all right. But I'm no good with short guns."

"Your training was only with rifles?" Franz asked curiously. He seemed perfectly calm.

"There wasn't any training," Ran explained. "I'm from Bifrost. I was a hide hunter before I ran off on a tramp freighter."

He grimaced. "I hated it," he said. He laced his fingers together. "But at the margin of profit on a shagskin or even a sleen, I couldn't afford to miss. And with a rifle, I don't."

"I see," said the youth. He frowned. "How much farther do we drive, then?" he asked.

The sky began to flicker blue. Wanda stuck her head out her side window and craned her neck upward. "I think . . ." she said, "that we've arrived."

She stopped the car and took it out of gear. Even as she did so, Lifeboat 23 from the Empress of Earth coasted to a roaring halt beside the ground vehicle. The boat was only thirty meters long, but as it settled through the dusk it looked as huge as the starliner itself.

The sidehatch was open. Crewman First Class Babanguida stood in the hatchway, lighted by the glare of the magnetic motors reflecting from the grasses. He held a submachine gun in his right hand and, in his left, a rifle as long as those used on Bifrost to hunt the twelve-tonne shagskins.

"Our chariot awaits, gentlemen," said Wanda Holly as she unlatched her door. Then she added, "Boy, is there going to be hell to pay if we blow this one."

* * *

"Here," Wanda said as she handed a long, loose shirt to Franz Streseman. Mohacks, at the controls of the grounded lifeboat, and Babanguida already wore similar overgarments of shimmering fabric. "Put this on. Ran—"

She lifted another from the locker and tossed it to him.

"—here's one for you."

Ran took the shirt absently and laid it beside him. He was checking the sights—holographic, with a bead-in-ghost-ring backup—and mechanism of the rifle Babanguida had given him. It was semi-automatic, with a three-round magazine holding cartridges as long as his hand. The bore was about fifteen millimeters. There were no markings on the receiver and the cartridge headstamp, MN 93, didn't tell him a lot either.

"An insulating wrap?" Franz said doubtfully. "I'm not cold, and it's likely to tangle."

"That cost us a right good amount, sir," Babanguida said. "Thirty-two hundred creds for the gun, and fifty apiece for the shells. He only had twenty-three shells."

"It'll do," Ran muttered. "It isn't an army we're going up against."

"I told you not to buy arms locally," Wanda said sharply. "You're likely to have tipped off Humboldt and von Pohlitz."

Ran fumbled two chips from his pouch and set them on the deck beside him. "This ought to cover . . ." he said as he eased back the charging handle on the empty magazine.

The rifle was two meters long and weighed upwards of twenty kilograms. The complex muzzle brake would bring the recoil down to bearable levels, but the resulting backblast would rattle shingles for a block behind the shooter.

"Oh, I trust you for the money, sir," Babanguida said, though his black hand quickly covered the chips.

Ran snorted. "I don't trust I'll be alive come morning," he said.

The rifle felt good in Ran's hands. It felt just like the weapon he'd used for six years after his father died, to feed and clothe himself and his mother . . . until she died too, and the young hide hunter became a Cold Crewman on the unscheduled freighter Prester John.

"There's local and local, Ms. Holly," said Mohacks from the control chair. "We had some time—and the boat, since the Officer of the Deck had cleared us to take it out. So we looked up an old bastard in a lodge three hundred klicks up in the hills. When he feels like it, he guides folks as want to hunt land whales."