Manna Read online

  Manna

  Lee Correy

  (G. Harry Stine)

  DAW BOOKS, INC.

  DONALD A. WOLLHEIM, PUBLISHER

  1633 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  ISBN-10: 0879978961

  ISBN-13: 978-0879978969

  Copyright ©, 1983, by Davis Publications, Inc.

  A DAW Book, by arrangement with the Author.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Vincent DiFate.

  First Printing, January 1984

  To Ellie and Dave

  Chapter 1

  Warrior in a Strange Land

  Soldiers were marching in the streets. Flags were flying. The schools were closed. Shops and offices were shut.

  I hadn’t paid enough attention to what I’d read about the United Mitanni Commonwealth. Everyone was taking a week off to celebrate both the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Oidak on Christmas Day, 2000, and the forty-ninth anniversary of the founding of the Commonwealth on January First, 2001.

  Holiday or not, there I was, and there was no returning.

  I walked down the almost empty esplanade of Topawa International Airport with my documents clutched in my hand, looking for customs officers or security police who were common fixtures in every other international airport. But no one was interested in seeing passports. Not wanting to be detained later as an illegal immigrant, I approached a Commonwealth Aerospace Lines employee, recognizable by his uniform.

  Unlike his counterparts in New York and Paris, he wore a 25-centimeter dirk on his hip.

  “Excuse me,” I asked deferentially, not wishing to offend an armed citizen in an unknown land, “could you direct me to Passport Control and Customs, please?”

  The man noted the bag I carried, and replied, “This is a free country, sir. We don’t use such things.”

  Well, I’d never used a passport to go from California to Arizona…or from the United States to Canada, either. If these people wanted to chance terrorists, revolutionaries, and criminals slipping in and out of their successful little country, that was their business. I was here to work for them if they wanted me to.

  I found a place to sit down in relative privacy and took the hard copy of the classified ad from “Help Wanted, Aerospace” comm/info net bulletin board. I read it again.

  “PILOT, atmosphere and orbit ratings, recent professional military background.

  Immediate employment. Call collect 144-203-794-1171.”

  I’d made the call and discovered that Landlimo Corporation headquartered in Topawa, the capital city of the United Mitanni Commonwealth, was interested enough to foot the bill for airlift to Topawa for an interview. The man called Wahak Teaq who’d interviewed me seemed interested but not sanguine. Personnel types are usually trained to appear that way.

  I’d agreed to come, but when I tried to learn about Landlimo Corporation, I struck out. It wasn’t listed in Standard & Poor’s International or any other corporate registry I could get my hands on in the United States.

  Folded behind the hard copy of the want ad was the hard copy of Landlimo Corporation’s letter of interest informing me to pick up my prepaid ticket at the nearest Commonwealth Aerospace Lines office and to call a specific telecomm number when I reached Topawa.

  I punched the number into my wrist phone, hoping somebody would be in the offices of the Landlimo Corporation. A phone robot answered with voice-over the video image of a stylized logo. “This is the office of the Landlimo Corporation. Because of the Unification Holiday, we’re closed until Monday, three January, twenty-fifty. Please call us then. The Vamori Free Space Port office is answering the emergency code. Thank you.”

  The letter of interest didn’t give an emergency number.

  I asked myself what I was going to do for two days in a strange land where I don’t knowanyone.

  Answer: Find a hotel in Topawa, do some sightseeing, and wait.

  I’d rather be in Topawa anyway. Under the circumstances that caused the U.S.

  Aerospace Force to retire me, I hadn’t wanted to spend the holiday season at home in Santa Barbara locked in intellectual combat with my pacifistic, professorial father. He knew more history and always won our arguments between his commitment to non-violence and my own commitment to service in the military forces of my country. He couldn’t understand my ulterior motive: going into space in the most advanced equipment available. The fact that I might have to fight didn’t bother me.

  My mother couldn’t care less. If she couldn’t manipulate it in a bio-engineering lab, it wasn’t part of her world. She never understood the philosophical barriers between my father and me. To a large extent, she never understood me, either, and therefore adopted a detached attitude. Never pick a scientist for a mother!

  I went looking for a bank or currency exchange booth and discovered there wasn’t any.

  In every country in which I’d travelled, even as a USAF officer, the first thing I did after clearing customs was to exchange whatever type of money I was carrying for the local currency minus an exchange fee for the bank.

  But the United Mitanni Commonwealth seemed to care about currency in the same fashion they cared about passports. “We’ll accept any money,” the ticket seller for the railway into Topawa remarked when I purchased my ducat at his window.

  The Terrestrial Almanac and Book of Facts had said nothing about this sort of thing.

  Neither had Sloane’s definitive book on the UMC. In fact, neither reference source mentioned the holidays. I decided books couldn’t describe or report on all facets of any nation, much less one as new and developing as this one.

  I found the rest room clean and the plumbing working. Eric Hoffer had observed that one could determine the general state of affairs in a country by how well the plumbing worked.

  The signs directing me to the railway to downtown Topawa some 20 kilometers west led me to a covered platform. I was a few seconds too late. The train was already moving.

  The lighted board announced the next train in thirty minutes.

  As I watched the train leave, I sensed something I hadn’t known since my cadet days in the energy labs of the Academy: the smell of burning coal from the locomotive.

  I had trouble believing anyone would burn coal. Why not alky-electric or even FotoFuel, I wondered? Then I remembered what Sloane said about the huge bituminous coal fields in the Dilkon Range.

  This was like stepping back a hundred years into the twentieth century but without the problems that twenty-first century technology had solved in the meantime. The photos and video of the last century were reflected in the sights that had assaulted me since stepping off the otherwise modern aerospace liner.

  I didn’t remain alone on the platform for long. Other people gathered to await the next train.

  An attractive couple accompanied by a small, stocky barrel of a man with dark hair and a huge, bushy mustache waited about five meters from me. The young woman was armedwith the usual short dirk hanging from the girdle resting lightly on her hips, and the mustached man wore a small curved scimitar. But the other young man bore no visible arms. Since everyone in this country seemed to go about armed with those short daggers, he must have just arrived via air.

  I couldn’t help overhearing their conversation in English, which was the common language of this country, albeit spoken with a different accent, rhythm, and inflection and with vowel shifts that were quite unique.

  “Ali, why did you do it that way?” the beautiful young woman was saying.

  “Vaivan, what recourse did I have?” the young man replied doggedly. “It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. I wasn’t dealing with mere governments. All of us knew I’d be facing power groups out to get us. That was the only reason for the meeting.”

  “
I’m pleased that you did not take any nonsense from them! They looked and acted like barbarians moving in for the kill. Nyeh Kuhltoornee!”

  “Omer, you’re a great pilot and a good friend, but I’m glad you weren’t the one who was in Santa Fe,” was the quiet reply from the beautiful woman.

  “Da! Russians are good at playing diplomatic games, but I am no Russian.”

  I’d seen the unarmed man somewhere recently. The couple looked related. Brother and sister perhaps. But Commonwealthers looked alike to me then in spite of the fact that this country had been a melting pot of Africans, Arabs, Europeans, Indians, Chinese, and Malays for centuries. In fact, there was no real national racial phenotype. Some high-tech bigots called them mongrels.

  The comm/info network produced so much news, so much data, and so much information that most people were over-communicated. They recalled only what directly concerned them when they heard or saw it. There wasn’t time to absorb the details of the entire world system.

  But I could recall them when necessary, thanks to my Aerospace Force Academy training. A military officer had to assimilate, evaluate, store and recall a great deal of information rapidly and accurately. Some day, the fortunes of the service might demand some scrap of information without an opportunity to consult the comm/info library.

  The mention of Santa Fe triggered my memory. I’d seen the young man on telenews.

  There was no mistaking his square face, piercing dark eyes, curly black hair, broad but determined mouth, and proud bearing. It had to be Alichin Vamori, the UMC delegate to the First International Space Commerce Convention, the Santa Fe conference.

  In the Chaveney-Villepreux Airport during the plane change, I’d caught the thirty-second telenews scene showing Alichin Vamori walking out of that conference in protest. I didn’t hear why he’d done it.

  I grew concerned. The Commonwealth’s open borders were conducive to the easy movement of terrorists and assassins. These three had to be important people and therefore targets for terrorists. Why were they standing openly on a railway platform waiting for public transportation? Other national leaders, corporate executives, and powerful people rarely exposed themselves in public without security cover which wasn’t evident here.

  I was a stranger and it wasn’t my job to protect them. But if there were trouble, I mightfind my anatomy uncovered. I began to glance around the platform at the others gathered there. My Aerospace Force training had included security precautions and visual personality profile evaluations. I’d never used them, and I didn’t like hand-to-hand. But I scanned for tell-tale signs of potential trouble.

  The wail of a three-tone steam whistle announced the arrival of the next train. It slipped into the station with a screaming whine as the locomotive swept past.

  The noise and sight drew the attention of everyone on the platform—except two people.

  My peripheral vision didn’t see the details, only the motion involved in the sudden sweeping aside of a kaftan. My eyes shifted, and I recognized the distinctive black shape of a Zastava pocket autocarbine.

  It took a fraction of a second for the gunman to slip the muzzle strap over his left hand so the light composite plastic weapon could be fired with accuracy.

  In that fraction of a second, I had to act because a Zastava has a cyclic rate of 1200 rounds per minute.

  I covered the six meters between us in two strides and a leap. I caught the gunman waist-high with my left shoulder with the only body check I’d thrown since personal defense sessions in the Academy gym many years ago.

  The assassin fired a clip of forty rounds. The noise of the Zastava sounded like a giant tearing a box. Everyone heard it, even over the noise of the halting train. But I’d hit him first and the bullets went into the roof of the platform shed where they exploded on impact.

  I hit the platform atop the gunman. His body broke my fall. I rolled clear and was on my feet.

  A scimitar appeared from nowhere and slashed the fallen gunman’s throat.

  I discovered the tip of a short dirk at my throat, too.

  I didn’t move. The young woman accompanying Alichin Vamori was holding the hilt of that blade which didn’t waver or tremble. She radiated her exotic beauty in the manner of women who know they have it, know what it’s for, and are unabashedly unashamed of it.

  Sexual assault in the Commonwealth had to be rare if all women were as armed and willing to use their weapons as she appeared to be.

  Looking directly into the dark eyes of this gorgeous woman, I said slowly, “Is this the way you show gratitude for saving your life?”

  “Are you sure that’s what you were doing?” she replied with equal coolness.

  “Why else would I have gotten myself mussed? Or should I have let you handle it in your local fashion, whatever that might be?”

  “Let the outlander be, Vaivan. I saw what happened,” the mustached man put in, wiping the blood from the scimitar with the gunman’s kaftan. He replaced the weapon in the scabbard at his waist and reached down to pick up the now-useless pocket autocarbine. He looked it over and remarked with a Slavic accent, “Assassin’s weapon, Zastava Vee-zee ninety-five. Zbrojovka manufacture, from the proof marks. Good only for one clip of forty, then throw it away. Nothing like this in Commonwealth service.”Alichin Vamori was kneeling over the dead body of the gunman. “There’s an Ilkan ID tattoo on his arm, Vaivan.”

  The woman called Vaivan withdrew the tip of the weapon from my throat and returned the dagger to her waist. She offered both hands, palms up. I took them in mine because they were beautiful hands. “My apologies, sir. I didn’t see the action. I heard only the sound of the Zastava. We’re indebted to you. I’m Vaivan Vamoru Teaq, and this is my brother, Alichin Nogal Vamori.” She indicated the other young man who looked so much like her.

  I reached out with my right hand and grasped Vamori’s. “I saw you on the telenews coverage of Santa Fe,” I said to him.

  “And you are…?”

  “Alexander Sandhurst Baldwin, Captain, United States Aerospace Force, retired.”

  “I know of you,” Vaivan Teaq said. “You’re in the Commonwealth because of Landlimo Corporation?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m the security manager of Landlimo Corporation. My apologies, Captain. This isn’t the usual way we welcome visitors to the Commonwealth,” she said.

  “I’m no longer a Captain,” I told her. “And I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances, Madame Teaq…”

  “Please,” she pleaded, “there are so many Teaqs and Vamoris that several of us would answer to ‘Madame Teaq.’ Since you’ll be working with us, please call me Vaivan.”

  She could make any request of me any time she wanted to, but I replied, “Only if you’ll promise never to call me Alexander or Alex. My friends know me as Sandy. And I haven’t been interviewed yet, much less accepted whatever job you have in mind.”

  “You’ve just been interviewed,” Alichin Vamori pointed out, looking down at the dead Ilkan gunman.

  “If you can fly as well as you can fight, no problem,” Vaivan added. “That is, if you want the job…”

  “We’ll talk,” I promised, “elsewhere than on a railway platform with a dead gunman at our feet.”

  “Such things don’t bother us. Twenty-first century civilized we may be, but we aren’t many generations removed from somewhat violent ancestors.”

  The man with the mustache and scimitar was introduced to me as Omer Kolil Astrabadi, the “Mad Russian Space Jockey.”

  “Russian?” I asked. “Your name sounds vaguely Arabic.”

  Astrabadi grinned toothily under his mustache. “I am not Russian. There was a time when my ancestors came westward over the steppes and ruled all the Russias. Now Russians rule us as part of the Soviet empire…but that will not last forever. I am called Russian only because I was born in Tyuratam. I am Kazakh, or Cossack, by blood, but I have taken a Commonwealth name.”

  “Omer’s one of the Soviet cosmonau
ts who defected to us,” Alichin added.

  “Ali, you’re acting like a Russian. You confuse history to suit yourself. I defected to Gran Bahia and then came here,” Astrabadi reminded him. “I will like flying with you, Sandy. It is good to fly without stupid politics in the way.”

  The police showed up to study, photograph, and remove the body of the gunman who was, according to his tattoo, a citizen of the Ilkan Empire located on the northern borders of the Commonwealth. The police asked questions of us and others on the platform and otherwise conducted police activities in connection with the disturbance. I had to produce my passport for a quick inspection, but they merely noted I wasn’t a Commonwealth citizen.

  Statements were taken on video and audio recorders. They wrapped the body in a plastic sheet and stuffed it into the trunk of a ground car. After about an hour, they finished their work and went away. It seemed to be a closed case insofar as I could determine.

  “There’ll be an inquest to clear the matter for the record,” Vaivan explained.

  “But Omer killed him,” I reminded her.

  “Before he killed us,” Vaivan said. “There were many witnesses.”

  “A police investigation is nothing more than this?”

  “What more do they need? And why should we waste time and money to investigate a hired gunman who’s already dead?”

  In the meantime, two trains had departed.

  The Commonwealth trains run on time with great regularity. I found myself accepting with pleasure Vaivan Teaq’s invitation to board the next one with the trio.

  Looking back on my first hours in the Commonwealth, they seemed filled with fortuitous circumstances that were almost improbable. But remembered later in the context of the Commonwealth culture I didn’t understand then, these almost coincidental happenings were no more accidental or lucky than other occurrences which shape our lives.

  Once aboard and in the comfortable compartment, I was asked by Vaivan, “What were your plans in Topawa, Sandy?”

  “Your phone robot told me the offices were closed until Monday. So I was on my way into Topawa to find a hotel and wait.”