Dawn awakened him with her rosy fingers.
The air was brisk enough to be comfortable, and it had enough of a salt tang to remind Slade of home. He stretched in bed—and found himself lying on gravel instead of a mattress.
"Where in the Hell am I?" the big man grunted. But the real Hell of it was, he knew the answer before he voiced the question. What he did not know was how he had come to lie behind a spaceport warehouse on Tethys.
"Via," Slade said in wonderment. He was wearing boots and a two-piece work-suit of neutral gray, not livery. There was a hand-scrip in one pocket. It held about a month's pay for a laborer in both Tethian currency and in crystalline Frisian talers. There were identity cards as well, three of them in three different names . . . and one of them the card Don Slade would have carried had he stayed on Tethys and succeeded to the Slade Councilorship.
The last thing Slade remembered clearly was boarding a lifeboat on Terzia. That boat sure as blazes had not landed him here . . . but the only other thing in his mind was a girl's face, elfin cute and smiling beneath a tumble of red curls.
The tanker remembered what the phantoms of his mind had told him aboard the Alayan ship, also. He scraped a small hole in the gravel and hid within it the card in his own name and one of the others as well. He kept only the one calling him Donald Holt. Into the same small hiding place he dropped the seal ring from his hand. The ring was unremarkable till its weight indicated that it was of projectile-grade osmium. It would look precisely the same in a bath of molten steel. It was the only thing Slade had kept with him from the day he lifted from Tethys as a Slammers recruit.
He filled in the hole with a gentle motion of his boot sole and noted the number of paces from it to the corner of the warehouse as he walked away.
Somebody had wished him well; the nondescript clothing and the false indentities were proof of that. The memory of the red-haired girl followed Slade, but he could not get a grip on the thought. "I sold my clock, I sold my reel . . ." the tanker sang to himself. But this Johnnie had come back from soldiering. . . .
A train of low-boys were emptying at the front of the warehouse. The foreman of the crew glanced at Slade sharply. The big man was not one of the warehouse team, however, and therefore not worth worrying about. Slade noted that the foreman and the truck drivers all seemed to be in red-piped clothing suggesting Dyson livery. The low-ranking cargo-handlers wore plain gray.
"To buy my love a sword of steel . . ." the castaway murmured as he smiled. He wiped his palms on his thighs.
It was still home. The sky to the west was the right pale gray with its hint of violet. The air had the odors of childhood, though they were over-printed here by ozone from landing thrusters. Slade had never spent much time at the Port when he was growing up, though it existed as an enclave in the family estates. A neutral enclave, administered by a board appointed by the Council as a whole. Now everyone with rank seemed to claim allegiance to the Dysons. Welladay. . . .
It was a city, now, the spaceport. There had been houses for the permanent staff and their families, a few hundred households at the time Slade had left. From the look of the barracks—some of the buildings very new, still under construction—there were many times that number present now.
Of greater concern were the shanties spreading beyond the formal buildings. Some of them seemed to be rigged out for entertainment of one sort or the other. Certainly they did not house workers. Men and women lounged among the shanties now, while the bustle of business continued on the field.
There were three huge starships down and a number of intra-system ferries and tenders. One of the latter had landed recently enough that steam was venting from its hull as the thrusters cooled. The cargo bay was still closed, but a handful of passengers had disembarked. Humans were always fringe cargo, save for the occasional new settlement—and, more often, the transport of a mercenary regiment.
Nothing like that here. Most of the passengers were entering a large air car in Krueger colors. They seemed to be a honeymoon couple and their servants, returned now with subdued expressions. Slade had never thought that the uncertainties of a long journey were a good way to begin married life; but then, he had never been married.
There was one man apart from the Krueger party. He was talking to the driver of a utility van outside the port office as Slade approached. Though the man's back was to the tanker, Slade could hear him saying, ". . . to Slade House?"
"Much in the way of luggage, then?" the driver asked.
"Pardon me, master," said Don Slade as he stepped almost between the two men, "but I couldn't help—Blood and Martyrs!"
"Came to look for you, my man," said Danny Pritchard with a slow, tight grin.
The driver was blinking from one ex-soldier to the other. Pritchard touched Slade's jaw to silence him and said to the driver, "A standard cubic-meter case is all. In the office. And an extra—"
"Thirty libra," Slade said, cued without either partner's conscious awareness of the question.
"—if you fetch it to the truck yourself."
The driver shrugged. He took the scribbled claim check and sauntered into the building.
"Been back long?" Pritchard asked as the two men sized each other up.
Danny looked a little more gray than Slade had remembered him. Fit, though, the Lord knew. Slade's exercises had not included walking. He was sure that even the kilometer he had just strolled through the Port village had raised blisters on his right sole and heel. "I don't think so," he said aloud. "Say, did you have anything to do with that?"
"With how you left Terzia, you mean?" Pritchard asked.
"No, I—oh, never mind," the tanker replied. "There's other things to worry about now, I guess."
His friend frowned and nodded his head. "Look," said Pritchard, "how much do you know about what's going on here the last while? Anything?"
"Is my brother dead?" Slade asked.
Pritchard nodded.
"Yeah," Slade muttered, aloud but to the part of his mind which believed in Hell. "Well," he continued, "I guess I'm not color-blind." He nodded toward a Port official in full Dyson livery, calling orders to a gang of laborers. "I suppose there's some things to straighten out back at the House, too."
"Don, I don't know how bad it is," said Danny Pritchard. "But it seemed like I ought to take a look. With the Colonel's blessing."
"I'm not asking anybody in to fight my fights," Slade said sharply.
"And I'm not offering to," Pritchard snapped back. "I'd have thought you'd seen enough with the Slammers to know that blowing people away's a curst poor way to settle things anyway—unless you figure to get them all. How many people do you think you and I can kill, Don?"
"Via, I'm sorry," the big man said. He chuckled. Clasping his comrade on the shoulder very lightly, he went on. "You know the only thing I was ever fit for was line command. Got any bright ideas, staff mogul?"
"Yeah," said Pritchard. "Got the idea that you lie low for a couple days instead of barging right into things. The Council's going to meet at Slade House, you know?"
"Are they now?" said the tanker. He squeezed the knuckles of his right hand between his lips. "Look," he went on, "have your driver drop me at one of the processing plants on the way. Number Six, that's the oldest one and it's close to the House. Nobody ever went hungry if he stopped by one of our plants when I was a kid."
"All righty!" called the driver as he wheeled out a plain, rectangular case. "Luggage it is."
Slade and Pritchard moved to either side to help shift the case to the end-bars to which it would be strapped. "You fellows figured out where you're going yet?"
Don Slade laughed. "In the short term, at least," he said. His muscles bunched as he slid the heavy case into position. "In the short term."