by Wen Spencer
Water tight was a minimal concern since the ship was compartmentalized and airtight. Even with the damage to the bridge and the breach in Alpha Red, the rest of the ship wasn't in danger of flooding even in the worst of storms. Luckily they had landed in shallow water, so it was unlikely they would sink.
"With the bridge gone, we're defenseless," Mikhail said. "We need to get the guns online."
"Is this a nefrim controlled world?" Tseytlin asked.
He glanced out the open hanger door to the bright shimmering blue, so far innocent of anything more menacing than sharks. "That is yet to be seen. We should assume it is. Maintain covert protocol. Radio silence. Minimal energy output."
Tseytlin nodded slowly. "It will take some time, but we can modify the Tigertail's weapon control to handle the Svoboda's guns."
"Good."
"Captain?" Rabbit had been trailing behind him, apparently obeying the last order given to him until given new ones.
Mikhail frowned at him and realized that Rabbit was looking across the hanger. He followed the direction of the little Red's gaze. There was a tall Red that Mikhail had never seen before limping toward them, licking blood from its lips. It was one of the replacements from Paradise.
Mikhail stepped backwards, wishing he had a weapon. While he trusted the Reds that been part of the crew for several missions, these replacements were loose cannons. "What is it?"
"I'm top cat." The Red said.
So the Reds had spent the time determining who was next in command with Turk's disappearance.
"What's your name?"
"547-8210-UKU-S68."
Mikhail hardened his gaze on the Red. It was difficult to intimidate someone you knew could tear off your arm and beat you with it. After growing up with Turk, Mikhail was fully aware of how strong a Red at any age was compared to a normal human. Still, the crèche-raised had to be dealt with from a position of apparent power. "What is your name?"
The Red blinked as if surprised by the request, and hesitated, thinking it through before offering up his handle. "Butcher."
"Butcher." Mikhail repeated, digging in hooks in the Red's attention. "How much do you know about planets? Ever been out of the city on Paradise?"
"No."
"Can you swim?"
"What is swim?"
Mikhail sighed and dropped his gaze. Oh Turk, Turk, Turk—I need you here, alive and well. "Do you know how to do duty rosters?"
"Yes, sir. I have ten dead, three wounded, leaving me twenty-seven fit for combat. I have set up three shifts of nine Reds each and assigned commanders for each shift."
"Good." Mikhail nodded. At least the new top cat was more than a set of finely tuned muscles. "Butcher, if an unidentified boat approaches, I need the Reds to hold fire until ordered."
"You said that you wanted natives to know we're unfriendly," Butcher said. Mikhail's orders to Inozemtsev had filtered through to the Reds then. "Why the change?"
"There might be other spaceships that crashed here," Mikhail said. "If the humans survived, they might use boats to travel around on. You know what a boat is?"
Butcher put his hands together to form a prow of a boat with his fingertips. "It's a thing that floats on water."
"Just because they're humans doesn't necessarily mean that they're friendly. Consider them as possible hostiles." Gods, how smart was this Red? Mikhail wouldn't have had to explain himself to Turk. "But do not fire on them unless ordered. Do you understand?"
"I understand." Butcher rumbled. "Show your teeth but don't attack."
* * *
Mikhail managed not to feel for hours, keeping it all blocked out as he climbed through his darkened, half-flooded ship. Finally he couldn't hold it off any longer. He retreated to his cabin to lock his service pistol into his safe. Using a marker, he wrote "Bad Misha Bad" and drew Turk's cat face scowling at him. He felt no need to turn his pistol on himself. No. Not yet. He could feel it coming, like the sun setting on the horizon; his ability to cope was fleeing. Dark despair would set in as inevitable as night, and this time, Turk wouldn't be there to save him from himself.
He leaned against the wall and covered the cat picture with his palm. "Good God, Turk, what am I going to do?"
"You go on," Turk would say, as if it was so simple and easy. He always envied Turk of that strength and had always leaned heavily on it.
He wanted to believe Turk was still alive, but the facts weighed too heavily. The airlock had opened while the Svodoba was still two or three kilometers off the water. Even if Turk survived the fall, he'd be hurt and out in open water teeming with predators. There would be no safe place to rest or hide.
"I'll try to be strong, Turk. The last thing my people need is me falling apart. I'll try to make you proud."
* * *
The next ship morning, they gathered under the constant noon sun for the mass funeral. They tested one of the body bags the shift before—made sure that it would float. It made him uneasy to launch his people out not into space but this seething living water. Space felt safe, its vast emptiness protected his dead from being disturbed until God chose to gather them up. It seemed like a betrayal, setting the dead adrift, helpless to countless forces that would disturb them. But there was nothing that could be done. They couldn't afford the bodies polluting the waters near the ship.
He read his memorial speech and then the names of the dead. Turk's name was on the list, but he couldn't bring himself to say it aloud. One by one, they pushed off the bags, letting the current take their dead. The sky was perfect blue, the sand a delicate pink, and the water crystalline. The black bags remained visible for hours, slowly drifting away. Helpless.
Afterwards he gathered up all the vodka in his cabin and shared the bottles out to the crew. They needed a drunk Captain no more than they needed a dead one.
6
I eat you
The current brought them evidence of the Icarus' fall within hours. Paige knew that Icarus had been heavily forested, but the amount that had been spilled off the vimana amazed her. The floating debris rolled toward them on the waves until the ocean was carpeted with green and brown. Drift flowers, naturally designed to ride the waves, reached them first. Then drop nuts, riding among the flowers like bald hillsides. Finally the broken bodies of dead land animals.
The chance of fouling the longboat rotors was too great. They would have to wait until the current carried the debris away. The repair to the fresh water tank was simple; filling it was an arduous process of hand-cranking the emergency desalination pump with a painstaking rate of one ounce of water per three minutes. They lacked the materials, though, to fix the hole punched through the crew's quarters. Rather than sit idle, stewing on what might lay ahead, Paige set the crew to fishing the drop nuts out of the flotsam. If she ended up buy a new engine, they'd need things to sell to raise money. With Jones standing guard in the sniper nest, the crew used the long boat hooks to herd the nuts into the cargo net to be lifted up to the deck. There Becky wrestled the large nuts out of the wet netting and rolled them into place to be dried.
"The birds I understand how they got up to the vimanas." Hillary prodded the body of a large furred animal with her boat hook. It rolled in the water, revealing that it was four-legged and hoofed. "But how did that get up there?"
"One of the many mysteries of life." Paige checked the nuts on the deck. Thanks to the baking sun of the cloudless day, the husk was already dry to the touch. "Take a break from fishing and turn these. Once they're dried, we'll move them to the cargo hold and fish more up."
Hillary made a sound of disgust. "One of the many mysteries of life. We're not savages. We still know how to build jump drives, terraform hostile planets into paradise, and alter our DNA. If we put our minds to it, we should be able to figure out anything. Can't you even guess?"
"I don't know enough to guess," Paige said.
"What is that suppose to mean? Don't know enough." Hillary shoved away the animal.
Surprisingly, it was
Jones that came to Paige's defense. "How many life stages does that animal have? Kites start as nymphs. That animal there might have wings in a different stage in life."
"It could have evolved on the vimana." Avery said. "We don't know how old the vimanas are geologically speaking."
"Or devolved." Paige said. "Theoretically you could create a species that could fly up to the vimana and yet the next generation be wingless."
"Hell, it could have been catapulted up," Avery said. "It might have been the only one of its kind on Icarus."
"Catapulted?" Hillary said.
Avery nodded. "Ya-ya supposedly experimented with catapults a hundred years ago. They shot animals at passing vimanas."
"They did not!" Hillary snapped.
"Did too," Avery said.
"Hillary." Paige said as the girl opened her mouth to automatically deny the possibility. Avery had a way of mixing nearly believable lies with unbelievable truth, so you were always sure he was lying, but every time you tried calling him on something that seemed too unbelievable, he could furnish proof.
"Icarus does not pass over Yamoto-Yamagochi." The girl said after a minute of outraged silence.
"I'm just saying that if Ya-ya tried it, then maybe someone else tried it too," Avery said.
"Why they'd stop trying?" Becky asked. "Living up there on the vimanas would be better than being down here on the water."
Ranantan whistled in a negative tone. "Stay with ship. Tech is good."
"So dismantle the ship and haul it up, piece by piece." Becky said.
"The only thing you can land on an vimana is organic material like the kites," Avery said.
"Do you think that's really true?" Jones asked from her perch, her heavy rifle across her knees. "That spaceship hit Icarus. If you can hit an vimana, maybe you can land on it."
Paige shook her head. She had tried not to think of it, but the memory of the accident had replayed again and again. There were times she wished she had a different kind of brain, one that didn't see life as puzzles that needed to be picked apart. "The ship only grazed it. Icarus was rolling even as the ship skimmed its topside." Paige mimed vimana and spaceship repulsing each other even as the ship's trajectory brought them together. "Like two polarized magnets, they repelled each other. Don't think the ship would have survived otherwise."
"Did you see what kind of ship it was?" Jones asked. "Human? Minotaur?"
"Obnaoian?" Ranantan asked hopefully. The ships from his race were few and far between and rarely survived the harsh weather long.
"It was a human ship," Paige told the little alien, and then added for the others' sake, "A Novaya Rus frigate. Probably lost its bridge when it clipped the vimana."
"We're going to go help them?" Becky asked.
"We've got enough trouble of our own." Paige told the girl what she would understand. It was more complex than that. Military new arrivals were always heavily armed and viewed everyone and everything with suspicion. When their command structure survived, they often practiced "eminent domain" that was really piracy. When their command structure died in the crash, they imploded into violence. "We can't be the only humans that saw them come down. Someone not hip deep in trouble will contact them."
"Ship!" Mitch shouted from the crow's nest—the farthest point from Charlene that Paige could put him. "Ship off the port bow!"
Paige scrambled up to the bridge where Orin was already scanning the horizon. With the debris in the water, it took her several minutes to pick out the low-riding craft.
"Good eyes, Mitch!" She called back studying the form.
Orin made a sound of discovery, indicating he'd caught sight of it too. "That's a civ raft, isn't it?"
"I think so." Civ rafts were wide, haphazard looking things. She could identify the nesting dome, the salvage heaps, and the holding nets.
Like all sentient life forms, the civ could have only reached the Sargasso after their race developed wormhole technology. Their rafts—if you scrapped off all the junk and muck—bore witness that they were once skilled builders. The bare bones were of a synthetic thermoplastic polymer that floated and resisted saturation by water. And the construction across the various rafts was too uniform to suggest that they been lucky and raided someone else's technology. But whatever level of civilization they had when they came to the Sargasso, they lost. The civ had reverted back to complete savages.
"Is it tagged?" Orin scanned the raft. "I don't see anything."
Paige looked for symbols that humans painted onto civ rafts. "There's no ear tags on it. It's not a tribe we know."
"I think we should stay away from them. We're all but dead in the water. I don't want to end up lunch for them."
The civ saw everything as food, regardless of sentience, and they ate their prey alive. It was a nasty end, and Paige didn't want to think about the possibility that survivors of the crashed frigate might have been picked up by the civ. Statistically, it was highly unlikely. The frigate would have traveled another hundred miles or more before hitting water. The slim chance still put a shiver down her back.
On the other hand, the civ salvaged everything in their path. The definition of ownership for civ seemed to be that only when you couldn't pry something up did it actually belong to anyone. The trick in dealing with the civ, thus, was making sure you didn't get stuck to something they owned. Considering that they kept spider mites as pets, that was easier said than done.
"They might have a converter in their salvage heaps," Paige said.
"You're not thinking of trading with them? This tribe has never even seen a human before."
"All the tribes we've traded with have spoken the same language. I can do this. Let's wait for the debris field to thin down and then I'll take the launch across."
Orin was shaking his head slowly. Paige knew that he saw the same dangers that she did and didn't like the odds.
"We need a converter," she said. "Or we'll stay dead in the water."
Orin glanced at their dead radio and a frown quirked the corner of his mouth as he calculated the odds of help coming to them. "I'll do it then."
"Orin . . ." She caught herself before she finished her thought. Either the Bailey's odd genetic mix or something in the Sargasso itself had given her family remarkable gifts. Each of them had their own strengths and weaknesses. Orin was her equal in reading people, and thus a capable translator. He didn't have, though, that odd mental quirk that Paige thought of as the white space, where jumps in logic took place, and answers came from seemingly nowhere. He wouldn't have her edge when faced with complications.
Unfortunately, he read what she had left unsaid and his frown deepened.
She poked him in the gut. "Suck it up. We've got too much on the line. I'm the best choice and you know it."
"I'd feel better if I couldn't kick your butt in a fair fight."
"I'll just have to fight dirty."
He scowled at her for attempting to make him laugh. She poked him in the stomach again.
"Hey, I've got the easy job," she said. "You have to deal with the crew while I'm gone."
* * *
First week out, she'd made a rule that only she and Orin were allowed on the bridge to keep all of her crew from cramming into the room. Thus all of them were outside the door when she opened it.
"We're going to trade with the civ." She forestalled them from all asking questions at once. "Charlene, we need something to trade the civ. Something that will take them time to unload from the launch. Something awkward to handle."
Charlene gave a resentful look for being ordered away first, but she went, taking Mitch with her. That boy had to grow a backbone.
Paige continued to hand out duties. "Hillary, take Becky and get everything off the launch except the motor. Even the bumpers. Avery and Manny, I want to be able to move the Rosetta if the current shifts and brings the raft toward us. Ran, I'll need a headset that will let me talk to Jones." She repeated the last in Obnaoian, just to make sure he understood.
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That left only Jones to ask questions. "I'm coming as your backup, right?"
"Yes. This is how it's going to work. Trading with the civ is like cooperative stealing. I'll go on board their raft, find what I want, and then start the trade. At that point, they'll take everything they want—which will be everything they can carry away—and I can take anything I can carry away."
Jones nodded her understanding. "What do I need to watch out for?"
"The biggest danger is their numbers. There's anywhere from fifty to two hundred of them onboard. If things go hostile, they'll tear us to shreds."
"They can try. What weapons do they have?"
"Nothing more sophisticated than knives."
Jones frowned down at Paige with her mouth shifted slightly to the side, as if rolling something about in her mouth, trying it out before letting it out. Finally, the woman asked, "I take it we can't do a preemptive strike?"
"No!" Paige cried. "They're intelligent. Primitive. But intelligent."
"Yeah, I thought that would be your answer. You know, I admire your morals, but they're damn inconvenient sometimes."
"They're not supposed to be convenient." Paige grumbled. She found it a little unnerving to discover that the most heavily armed person on board had such a homicidal attitude. "You have to fight to keep your bearings or the current will take you where it wants; the easy course is also the one that leaves you helpless."
Jones made a short disgusted noise. "Sometimes you don't have a choice."
"You always have a choice," Paige said firmly. She considered switching to someone else to back her up. No. If things went badly, Jones had the right mindset and reactions. In the future, with more civilized races, though, Jones would be a bad choice as backup.
Luckily Charlene and Mitch returned, saving Paige from clashing farther with Jones over morality. The teenage lovers carried a large rough wooden barrel which they eased down onto the deck cautiously.
"I think these will work well." Charlene pried the lid off the barrel. Inside were dark green glass blanks.
Paige picked one of the blanks up. They were slightly bigger than a softball, slick and difficult to hold. To a civ, with their smaller hands, the blanks would be nearly impossible to carry more than one, thus perfect for her needs. "Thanks Charlene," Paige put the blank back into the barrel. "We have like ten barrels of these?"
