“Get out of here, you neeking goscack! I'm nobody's dinner yet!” Reaching down, he picked up a piece of some instrument that he hoped was not essential to the skimmer's functioning and threw it.
Letting out an unexpectedly melodious tootle, the weird arboreal with the internally gimbaled oculars dodged the chunk of airborne apparatus as it spiraled up and out of the wounded skimmer. Multiple wings extended out of the sides of its head and rotated parallel to the ground. In addition to providing lift, the spiral-screw wing system was an excellent design for shedding precipitation. Nature was ever so goddamned inventive, he told himself sullenly. Trying to taxonomize the bizarre creature would twist a bemused biologist's bowels.
Shadrach Hasselemoga was only mildly interested in it. The life-forms that commanded his attention were the ones that put out leaves and sent down roots or popped ballooning basidiocarps out of decaying wood. They didn't have internally pivoting eyeballs. Or, for that matter, eyes of any kind. At least, not usually.
Turning back to the console that was shielded from the ubiquitous rain by a still intact portion of the skimmer's transparent canopy, he spoke in the direction of the omnidirectional voice command pickup. There was no response from the skimmer's internal controller. This was hardly surprising since nothing was lit, indicating a complete loss of power. The emergency backup node was supposed to be sufficiently armored to survive all but a hundred percent destruction of the rest of the craft. The fact that he could now sue the manufacturer of said device for false and misleading claims was at present of little comfort. When he tried it, the craft's manual instrumentation proved equally demised.
Something was not right. Yes, the skimmer's environmental dome was shattered. Yes, the craft had suffered serious damage. But certain components on the sophisticated vehicle should still be functional. The air-circulation system, for example, was independently powered. Even in the event of catastrophic energy failure, it should still be cycling atmosphere. But it was as silent as the communicator.
Alternately cursing the rain and his undeserved ill fortune, he made an attempt to effect temporary repairs, something someone in his position had to be skilled at. No luck. He attempted to coerce the skimmer's computation unit to effect minimal internal resuscitation. No chance. He tried cursing and beating and threatening the variegated deities of half a dozen different religions, not all of them human. The multispecies heavens ignored him.
He was stuck.
As he morosely contemplated his indisputable stuckness, a line of brilliantly iridescent blue-and-crimson kindling came marching in single file through a gap in the broken dome. Wending their way toward where he was seated, their multiple short, jointed legs striding along in unison, they looked for all the world like a monkish procession of deeply religious stick insects. They had bulging black four-lensed eyes, slender quadruple slowly weaving antennae, and disagreeably sharp proboscises. Looking down, he gazed sternly at the first of the twenty-centimeter-long intruders. It halted in front of his leg. Delicate, sensitive antennae tapped gently, tentatively, at the hydrophobic tropical weave of his pants. The hypodermoid proboscis probed, searching for an opening between the raindrops that ran down his leg.
His off-world blood would probably give it indigestion, he knew. Without giving it the opportunity to sample the possible stomachache-inducing effects of imported alien body fluids, he raised his foot and brought it down firmly. There was a muted crunch. Green-and-yellow goo splotched across the floor.
Instantly the dance line of intruding ambulatory twigs did a united about-face and, without breaking stride, proceeded to take their leave of the skimmer. There was no violent counterattack, no attempt to gain retribution for the death of their point twig, no multiple keening high-pitched wail of despair. But as they exited the craft back along the branch they had used to enter it, each one deliberately and pointedly defecated on the still gleaming composite rim.
Go ahead, he thought irately. Take your turn. Fate has already done to me what you are only doing now.
He needed to take stock, he knew. Best to do so before nightfall. If those responsible for such things were doing their job, he would be located and lifted out of here before the onset of twilight, let alone darkness. But one never knew. As those in his position were well aware from long and bitter experience, the number of complete and utter morons inhabiting government posts was inversely proportional to the distance from recognized centers of civilization. It might happen that he would be compelled to spend a night, or even two, out in the Viisiiviisii before a rescue-and-recovery team arrived from Taulau or another Commonwealth outpost. Should that come to pass, it would be nice to have a few small items readily available. Water would never be a problem on Fluva. But it would be nice not to have to search for food. A dry place to sleep would also be welcome, and a weapon or two was imperative. The Viisiiviisii was not a benign place for the solo visitor to go camping.
Thoughts of a dry place to sleep caused him to rise and scramble to the far side of the skimmer. Having briefly blacked out at the moment of impact, he had no idea of the terrain on which he had landed. Reaching the outer wall, he stuck his head out into the full force of the rain, leaned through a wide gap in the shattered dome, and looked down. A single monosyllable emerged from between tightened lips. It was foul.
His incapacitated skimmer was resting amid a tangle of broken branches and trailing vines some twenty meters above the placid water, held aloft by trees whose bases and buttresses were submerged in at least another twenty meters of tannin-infused muck. A plethora of unpleasant possibilities rushed helter-skelter through his brain.
Then there was a loud crack, and the necessity to think was obviated by the need to grab onto something solid and unmoving. It was a futile gesture, because the entire skimmer was already moving—downward.
The supportive branches beneath it having finally given way under the weight of the intruder, the skimmer banged and bounced in an inglorious and quite noisy descent toward the water below, banging off trunks and smashing through branches at the astonishing rate of one irate invective per second. It landed stern-first with a great splash, its back end sinking halfway under the surface before it finally stabilized atop a pile of exhausted wood.
Breathing hard, teeth clenched, Hasa picked himself up off the slanting deck. An intermittent morbid gurgling continued to rise from the part of his craft that was now underwater. His initial reaction was to kick the console, the walls, the floors, everything around him. He wanted to hurt every corner of the craft that had so rudely betrayed his trust. But he didn't dare, because further violent movement risked destabilizing his already precarious roost. Losing the skimmer didn't worry him. If it sank, it sank. Fine and good riddance. Once safely back in town he would eagerly apply to collect the insurance. But it could not be allowed to sink before he had recovered and stowed somewhere safe and stable those few vital elements of survival he had mentally inventoried only moments earlier.
Moving as carefully and slowly as his temper and the rain-slicked floor of the skimmer would permit, he made his way to the back of the vehicle. The storage lockers he sought were now underwater. Opening them and extracting their contents meant working up to his neck in the placid nutrient-rich liquid. He did not worry if the food paks, for example, were spoiled or not. Everything on Fluva that was subject to invasion and spoilage by mold or fungi was sealed tightly against such intrusion. Anything that wasn't did not last more than a week before it was overwhelmed by the planet's incredibly fecund, moisture-driven flora.
So the food paks he dragged out were still secure in their self-cooking wrappings. He located a repeating pistol and packets of old-fashioned explosive shells. Fancy neuronics and electrics didn't work well on alien worlds where the neutral tolerances of inimical local life-forms had yet to be calibrated. Either of the former might do no more than give a tickle to an onrushing carnivore. Explosives, on the other hand, had the virtue of not being species- or nervous-system-specific. They wer
e marvelously egalitarian in their lethality.
Locating two rain capes, he immediately slipped one over his head. Though his tropical suit was ostensibly fully water-repellent, a person couldn't have too many layers of rain protection on Fluva. The rest of the gear he crammed into a backpack that he hung on a sturdy branch on one of the trees located safely outside the downed craft. If the skimmer's unseen suspect wooden supports suddenly gave way, sinking it to the ground twenty meters below, he would still have his limited store of salvaged supplies. This essential survival task completed, he crawled carefully down the branch he had used to reach the other tree and back into the skimmer.
Why he decided to check on the emergency beacon he didn't know. Even though the rest of the skimmer had lost all power, including backup, whatever had caused the trouble should not, could not, affect a unitary-sealed emergency beacon. That device would be secured firmly in the center of the skimmer's hull, in the region of greatest protection, sending out its powerful locating signal together with details of the accident that had caused its activation. If outside the regional pickup range of Taulau or any other town, the signal would then be picked up by one of the satellites orbiting the planet and relayed to the nearest appropriate outpost. But having secured his emergency supplies, he now had nothing left to do. So for the hell of it, he decided to check the beacon.
What he found made less sense than anything he had encountered since he'd hit the water.
Removing the appropriate panel in the center of the deck, he made sure it was fastened to a sticktight on one wall so it wouldn't go sliding down into the water that filled the lower half of the skimmer. He'd already spent enough time fumbling around under the surface while scavenging his emergency supplies. By now the water inside the immobilized craft had grown still, and there was no telling what sorts of parasites or other indigenous nasties might have infiltrated the partially submerged hull.
Beneath the panel, a transparent vacuum seal shone dully. Though it lay under a still intact portion of the skimmer's canopy, rainwater running down the inclined deck threatened to enter the protected space. Rolling up the second rain cape, he used it to rig a temporary barrier to divert the steady trickle around the opening. Turning back to the cavity, he fingered the necessary visible touch pads in proper sequence. The panel slid aside.
His brows drew together. In the diffuse light that filtered down between the trees from a cloud-filled sky it should have been easy to pick out the glow of multiple indicators on the outside of the beacon box. That it was dark and devoid of light didn't necessarily mean the device wasn't working—but it was not a good sign. Not a good sign at all.
It meant making one more plunge into the water that filled the aft section. Nothing darted from the water to assault him, and he held his breath religiously to avoid ingesting any of the untreated fluid. Emerging with toolbox in hand, he returned to the opening and cracked the beacon's seal.
Passing the tester over the device produced nothing: not so much as a chirp from the auditory indicator or a squiggle on the small screen. It should have lit up with half a dozen different readouts. Instead, it was as flat and dull as a politician in the absence of media. Of course, the crash landing could have damaged the tester as well, but like most tools, it was almost too simple and straightforward to hurt. And it was too much to expect that both the supposedly invulnerable emergency beacon as well as the much smaller tester had suffered similar critical damage during touchdown. A smashup serious enough to cause them both to fail would have done much worse to his far more fragile human frame, sofoam cocoon notwithstanding.
Pondering the unreasonable unlikeliness of it all, he happened to glance at the right side of the beacon. It should have looked exactly the same as the left side, the top, the front, and the back. But it did not. Even in the poor light he could make out the thin but distinct line running the length of the box, about midway up the side. Frowning, he traded the tester for another tool and traced the latter along the line. The beacon popped open: something it should not do outside an authorized inspection-and-repair facility. Wary of the rain, he used his body to shield the box as best he could as he leaned over and in for a closer look.
As with any similar device, the beacon's internal components were solid: drawn, painted, flashed, or strobed in place. None of which explained the hole in the middle of the lower right quarter. The fissure had not been made with a drawer, painter, flasher, or strober. Something large and heavy had been used to smash a hole in the surface of the unit. Even in this day and age there were uses for low-tech. The hole might have been made with something as simple as an old-fashioned hammer. It might have been made by a rock. The means was unimportant.
Circuitry had been shattered. To fix it would require the resources of a fully equipped shop and a skilled flasher. He had neither. The dimensions as well as the nature of the destruction led to an unavoidable conclusion.
Someone had entered, opened, and deliberately damaged the beacon. Considered thoughtfully, this implied that whoever had done so had presumed that the beacon might soon be put to use and that the perpetrator preferred it not be available at such time to perform its designated functions.
Eyes widening, he removed a portable work light from the toolbox and stuck it to his forehead. Further examination revealed everything he now suspected and far more than he wanted to know.
The skimmer's power monitor had been adjusted to show a full charge when in reality he had departed Taulau on less than a tenth of that. Guidance systems had also been tampered with. In fact, once he got deeper into the craft's instrumentation he had a hard time finding something that had not been tampered with. It implied more than casual destruction. In as professional and methodical a way possible, someone had gone to considerable trouble to ensure that no matter how skilled its pilot, this particular skimmer would never be able to return its passenger to his point of origin.
Sabotage.
But why him? Sure, he had enemies, both personal and professional. He knew most of them by name and took perverse pride in the extent of the list he had accumulated. But though he went down that list from beginning to end and back again, he could not settle on the identity of a single person willing to go to the extreme of killing him. Priding itself on the maturity of its citizens, the government of the Commonwealth frowned on individuals who used murder to settle personal disputes. That did not mean killings were a thing of the past. After all, many of the Commonwealth's citizens were human. But such killings were not frequent. They were even less common on outpost worlds like Fluva, where residents often had to rely on one another to survive, much less prosper.
Besides, most of his enemies were not unlike himself: straightforward and to the point in their dealings. Though they displayed many qualities, deviousness was not often among them. Anyone wanting him dead would like as not have confronted him face-to-face or at least tried to jump him on a town walkway or in his rented apartment at night. He stared at the several instrument panels whose interiors he had exposed to the light. This was too complex. It hinted at motives beyond a simple desire to see a certain Shadrach Hasselemoga dead.
Whoever they were, they had been very thorough. It wasn't enough to ensure that his craft would crash well beyond any outpost of civilization. They had gone to the trouble of disabling the emergency beacon as well. No emergency beacon meant that even if anyone thought to come looking for him, they were going to have a hell of a time finding him in the tangled mass of vegetation and waterways that comprised the Viisiiviisii.
Looking up, he saw that the sloping angle of his touchdown had smashed a narrow pathway through the trees. That, at least, should be visible from the air—depending on how heavy the overcast and intense the rainfall whenever someone came skimming by. And with each passing day, the fecund varzea would send out more and more shoots and leaping vines and fast-growing spores in an attempt not to close the gap but to make use of the bounty of sunlight it presently provided. Given the astonishing rate of local
growth, within a week or so the edges of the gap would be filled with a ragged assortment of fresh, opportunistic vegetation. At least until then, he had no choice but to stay close to the skimmer. Ultimately, it might be all that would remain even slightly visible from above.
Sitting there beneath the cracked and broken canopy, the rain spattering monotonously around him, he listened to the resurgent cries of the Viisiiviisii and pondered a thought that rode roughshod even over the legendary Hasa anger.
I could die here, he realized with sudden clarity.
Though he had never considered himself immortal and knew better than most that the universe would continue on quite comfortably without him, he had always believed himself more durable than his fellow humans. Given the inherent dangers of his chosen profession, he had from the beginning anticipated a possible early demise. Indeed, he had been through a number of difficult scrapes, only to have survived them all with both body and bank account intact. But such incidents had all been natural consequences of his work. Never before had anyone set out to kill him with such detailed malice aforethought.
The more he contemplated his situation, what had happened to him, and how it had happened, the angrier he became. It grew and seethed and boiled within him until it seemed that any alien raindrops that struck his forehead would surely be turned to steam from the mere contact. Anger matured into fury, and fury into a determination to learn who had done this to him and why. And once he had learned that to his satisfaction, once he had established it to a certainty and without a shadow of a doubt, then the residents of Taulau Town would do well to conceal themselves inside their homes and places of business and lockseal their doors and wait out his wrath much as they would one of the occasional monster storms that came thundering down off the steep slopes of the western mountains. Such a storm would be as a gentle breeze compared to the kind of weather a livid Shadrach Hasselemoga was going to bring to unsuspecting Taulau.
Drowning World Page 3
