by David Drake
" . . . just to see her jump an' fall."
The music, a vibration through the motorman's spine, ended as the piccolo shut off. Leaf sighed with his eyes closed and fumbled in the pocket of his tunic. He still had a few half-credit coins left. He slipped one out and raised it toward the slot above and behind him, moving by practiced reflex.
"Tee for Texas," he mouthed. "Tee for Tennessee . . ."
A hand closed over Leaf's groping hand.
"Go away, honey," he muttered tiredly. "I'm fucked out, believe me."
"I said, are you gonna shut that noise off or am I gonna bust your head?" a voice shouted in his ear.
Leaf's eyes flashed open. He wasn't drunk any more, but his skin was very cold.
The whore had gone to plow more useful fields. Another sailor bent close to the motorman's face. The tally around his cap read Elephant, not a big surprise. He was a young fellow, six inches taller than Leaf and muscular. His flush was drink or anger or both.
Almost certainly both.
"Got a problem with something, sonny?" Leaf said as he rose smoothly to his feet. Leaf wasn't shouting, but the general volume of noise had dropped enough that most of those in the reception room could hear him. He let the coin drop to free his hand. "Can't get your dick stiff, maybe?"
This wasn't the sailor from the floor show, but he'd heard the story. He reacted without hesitation, punching Leaf in the face.
Leaf had ten years in the Herd and a lot of bar fights behind him. He shifted his head so that the fist glanced along his jawbone. It would leave a bruise, but for the moment Leaf scarcely noticed it against the rush of alcohol and adrenaline.
He flung himself backward into the piccolo as though the punch had caught him squarely, then sprawled on the floor. If the other sailor was smart, he'd try to put the boot in—and then it was going to get interesting.
He wasn't smart. "And leave it fucking off!" the battleship sailor shouted as he turned toward the bar instead of finishing what he'd started. "Flitterboat pussies!"
Leaf came off the floor. The crate of bottles was in his hands, swinging in a sideways arc.
Shouted warnings started the kid's head rotating to see what was happening behind him, but it was already too late. The crate hit him at the center of mass. Bottles flew out. The impact smashed ribs and flung the victim over the bar. He caromed off the tapster who had already jerked down the alarm lever.
It was too late for that as well. Even before the crate landed, battleship sailors and crewmen from smaller vessels began to fight one another all over the reception area.
Some of the girls joined in, shrieking with fury. It wasn't any business of theirs . . . but then, all the sailors were from the same Free Company.
Leaf ran for the stairs to the sub-basement. He collided with a redhead in a string top which displayed all the little she had. The whore seemed to have lost her client below. She grabbed Leaf with both hands and began mechanically to proposition him.
"Move it, bit'h!" the motorman snarled, realizing that the right side of his jaw was numb. He pulled himself free.
There was an emergency exit from the sub-basement into a drainage tunnel, and this was an emergency by Leaf's standards. In a matter of minutes the Año Nuevo would be full of stormtroopers with truncheons and stun gas, Wyoming Keep's Patrol or the Herd's own shore police. Leaf didn't intend to be around while the authorities sorted out how the fight had started.
The holographic display was still tuned to the upper-crust party. Leaf dived past it, but the voice of the commentator followed him down the stairwell saying, "And why is Prince Hal wearing the uniform of a high officer in Wysocki's Herd? Because it's his uniform! Yes, really, darlings, the most eligible bachelor in Wyoming Keep is a Free Companion!"
3
May 17, 382 AS. 1106 hours.
"Wilding," said Brainard, extending a hand over the rail to help the officer-trainee back aboard, "see if you can get a response on the radio. I can't raise a thing."
Wilding was barely able to move after boosting Leaf on board. Heat, the weight of his environmental suit, and the boggy soil into which he sank knee-deep at every step combined crushingly. "Sure," he gasped. How did you explain to a man like Brainard that other people had limits? "In a minute. Are the balloons okay?"
Radio communication was as undependable as radar imaging in the charged Venerian atmosphere. The alternatives were long-wave communication through the sea itself, and modulated laser. Long wave was slow, and the apparatus was too heavy to be mounted on a hovercraft. Laser commo was fast and virtually proof against interception, but it was line-of-sight only.
The answer was to raise the transmitter a thousand feet or more above the surface by balloon, bringing distant receivers above the horizon.
Brainard shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "All that gear's gone."
Wilding was exhausted, but the man he had rescued moved like a zombie in a suit twice the proper size. Bozman, the assistant motorman, supported Leaf's bulging body to his station just aft the torpedo controls.
"I got the auxiliary running, chief," Bozman chattered. "We'll have you plugged into the air conditioning soonest."
Leaf's suit dribbled pools of slime on the deck as the motorman moved. "How's the main motors?" he asked.
Wilding found the motorman's words remarkable both for their huskiness and for the fact that they were directed at his regular duties.
"They're fucked," said Caffey in a grim voice. "The commo's fucked. And we're fucked."
The torpedoman had clipped a light machine-gun—his personal weapon, since they weren't stock issue for hovercraft—to the seaward rail. The gun tub was rotated inland, covering the pool fifty feet away where the giant snake and spider had hunted, but no direction was safe.
Brainard glanced at Caffey without speaking. The torpedoman grimaced, then broke eye contact by calling to his striker, "Wheelwright! Bring another drum of ammo."
Wilding slid into the cockpit and reconnected the hose to his environmental suit. The seepage of cool, dry air through the suit's lining steadied his mind before it could make any practical difference to his body.
Brainard had brought the console displays up as soon as the auxiliary drive provided power for them. The radio transmitted an any-station emergency signal; K67's main computer would key the crewmen's commo helmets if there were a response.
There wasn't a damn thing else to do, except check the balloon ascender gear. The console had a scarlet Not Ready message under that heading.
A glance astern showed why. K67 had been inverted at some point as she spun ashore. The last five feet of the deck had been scraped, carrying away two decoy launchers and the long-range communications apparatus.
For the first time since a cruiser invisible over the horizon began to shell them, Wilding had leisure to consider their situation. Caffey was right. They didn't have a prayer.
K67 lay in a salt marsh inside this nameless island's outer barrier of coral. The coral had shredded the hovercraft's skirts, but that was probably the reason any of them were still alive. A rigid-hulled vessel would have disintegrated on impact, but the tough, flexible skirts had scrubbed away K67's velocity as they abraded.
Air-cushion torpedoboats hung their pair of primary weapons in the plenum chamber. Both torpedoes had been torn from their mountings as K67 bellied into the bog. Their safety mechanisms kept them inert despite the shock.
The torpedoes lay like a pair of broken sticks in the path the hovercraft tore through the vegetation. The body of one had been crushed like a pinched grassblade, while the warhead of the other lay askew with half its attachment lugs stripped. Hungry reeds nuzzled the weapons in vain.
The warheads contained a nominal thousand pounds of barakite explosive. Their blast was designed to penetrate the main armor belt of a superdreadnought. If either weapon had detonated during the crash, there would have been nothing left of K67 and her crew.
Inshore, the jungle ascended in terraces of dark gre
en toward the peak that the hovercraft's database indicated was a thousand feet above mean sea level. Mist and the foliage bulging from the slopes prevented Wilding from checking the accuracy of the charts.
Far to seaward, a storm or the broadsides of massed battlefleets thundered. The jungle responded with a fluting cry that seemed even more terrible because of its supernal beauty. Wilding shivered.
"I could maybe get Number One fan spinning, sir," said Leaf. "The blades are dinged, that's all. But we can't pressurize the plenum chamber with just one fan."
"You've studied this stuff, haven't you?" Brainard said.
"There aren't any skirts left to patch, anyhow," Caffey said morosely. He massaged his chest where the crash harness had held him during the multiple impacts. The gesture reminded Wilding of how much his own ribs hurt.
"Where's Holman?" Newton asked. "When's he comin' back for us?"
The coxswain sounded curious rather than aggrieved. He stared out to sea.
There was no sign of K67's consort, but the surface boiled in a natural frenzy. Living things devoured one other and the flesh of creatures the salvos had killed.
"Wilding!" Brainard snapped. "You studied surface life, didn't you? Your file said you did."
Wilding turned around, blinking in surprise. The CO had been talking to him. . . .
Brainard's face was hard. Not angry, but lacking any sign of weakness or mercy. The ensign was three calendar years younger than Wilding himself, but Brainard had been born with a soul as solid as the planetary mantle. He belonged here, and maybe the other crewmen did as well; but Hal Wilding would vanish into this environment as swiftly as the tags of bloody froth where the sharks fed.
"Yessir, that's right," Wilding said aloud. He heard with horror the crisp insouciance with which he clothed his words. It was the only protection he had, and it was no protection at all. "I have some course work in ecology."
Brainard wasn't one of his Twelve Family acquaintances, before whom Prince Hal needed to conceal serious endeavor. "Ah, I completed a degree program, as a matter of fact."
Wilding looked up at the jungle humping into the white sky behind them. "I don't have a great deal of specific knowledge, though. The rate of mutation here is so high that new data is generally obsolete by the time it's catalogued."
"I'll tell you where that bastard Holman is," Caffey muttered to the coxswain. "He's left us here because he's too chickenshit to risk coming ashore to take a look for us."
Brainard turned and pointed his right index finger at the torpedoman. "Drop that," he said quietly. "Nobody's been abandoned."
"That last salvo may have been right on top of them," Wilding suggested. He tried to remember the moments in which the man-made waterspout swelled to engulf K67. "They were—"
"Drop that!" Brainard repeated, the syllables sharp as gunshots. Wilding's tongue and heart froze.
"We aren't K70's problem," Brainard continued softly. "We're our problem. We're alive, we've got our equipment. So we're going to make things all right."
"We got fuel for three months, just running the auxiliary," Leaf said. His voice was surprisingly perky considering the shape he'd been in minutes before.
"If the auxiliary don't pack it in, you mean," retorted Caffey.
"We should be all right for food," Wilding said, pretending that he didn't believe the torpedoman's gloom was a realistic assessment of their chances. "We can supplement emergency rations with the flesh of most of the animals. Maybe even a few plants."
"The laser communicator can double as a portable," Brainard said, ignoring everyone else's comments. "Is it still functioning?"
"Look, Fish," Leaf said to the torpedoman, "the auxiliary'll still be running after you 'n me 're fertilizer. Anyway, I could rig Number One motor to power the air system."
Wilding unlatched the laser unit and lifted it so that the prongs feeding power were free of the jack on the bottom of the chassis. The self-contained module had its own sighting and stabilization apparatus. It was supposed to be capable of an hour's continuous operation on its integral batteries.
Wilding switched the unit on. It ran its self-test program without hesitation. "Checks out," he said and lowered it into its cradle again. A weight of fifteen pounds made the module portable but not exactly handy.
"Hey!" shouted Yee from the gun tub. "Hey!"
Everyone turned to follow the line the twin guns pointed to starboard. Thirty feet from K67, a bubble of methane rose to the surface of the bog and plopped.
Twenty feet beyond, in line with the wrecked torpedoboat, a six-foot dimple in the marsh marked the spot a previous bubble had burst.
Yee fired a short burst. The muzzle blasts flattened a broad arc of the nearest vegetation. Explosive bullets cracked into the reed tops with dazzling flashes. The gun tub would not depress low enough to rake the semi-solid ground.
"Cease fire!" Brainard ordered. "Cease fire! Everybody get sidearms. We'll wait by the rail for it to surface!"
Reeds smoldered where the bursting charges had ignited them. The air was bitter with the mingled stench of explosives and burning foliage. A gray haze drifted away from the torpedoboat.
Another bubble broke surface ten feet closer.
Caffey struggled to unclamp his machine-gun from the port rail. Leaf, moving without wasted effort, unclipped an automatic rifle from the motormen's station and tossed it to his striker. The short blade clicked from his multitool. Newton and Wheelwright scrambled for their personal weapons. The CO was already pointing his rifle over the rail at a 60o angle.
Wilding wore a pistol as part of his uniform. He knew from his several attempts at qualification firing that the weapon might as well be back at the Herd's shore installation for all the good he could accomplish with it. He ran to the bow, skirting Caffey in a tense pirouette as the torpedoman freed his machine-gun and turned with it.
Wilding's air line disconnected and reeled itself back into the cockpit. The suit's impermeable outer skin slapped him like a wet sandbag. The two decoy dispensers forward had come through K67's grounding without damage. They were simply spigot mortars from which small propellant charges lobbed the decoys.
"Look," one of the crewmen cried, "he's running!"
Wilding wasn't running. There was no place to run.
The decoy was a bomb-shaped projectile weighing about fifty pounds. At the first dispenser, Wilding broke the safety wire which locked the fuze until the dispenser fired. He spun the miniature propeller on the projectile's nose to complete the arming procedure. The decoy was not supposed to burst until it was at least thirty feet from the vessel launching it. . . .
The arming propeller came off in Wilding's hands and tinkled onto the deck, arming the decoy. He lifted the decoy in a bear hug and staggered to the starboard rail with it. He couldn't see past the bulky cylinder.
"Get b—!" he shouted and slammed into the starboard rail. The impact knocked the breath out of his body and tipped the projectile nose-first into the bog.
Brainard grabbed a handful of Wilding's suit and jerked the officer-trainee back to safety as the decoy fell.
The nose of the decoy sank into the soft ground before the bursting charge went off with a whump! and drove a pair of binary chemicals together. The mixture expanded as a bubble of heavy gas which formed a skin with the moisture in the air and ground.
The gas was a brilliant purple-gray and so hot that it blistered the hovercraft's refractory plastic hull. At sea the decoy would skitter over the tops of the waves, drawing enemy fire and attention until it cooled and flattened into an iridescent slick. Here—
K67's crew stumbled to the vessel's port side, driven by heat from the swelling decoy. A claw eighteen inches long drove through the glowing boundary layer of decoy and atmosphere, clacked twice, and then withdrew on its jointed arm. The muscles within the crustacean's translucent exoskeleton had already been boiled a bright pink.
Five guns dimpled the decoy's opaque surface with automatic fire.
"Cease fire!" Ensign Brainard ordered again. "We'll need the ammo soon enough."
Wilding got his breath back. He straightened. Brainard released him. The decoy began to ooze sluggishly away from the torpedoboat. It seared a broad track into the reeds behind it.
"All right," said Brainard without emotion. "This boat's shot. That's too bad, but we're still okay ourselves."
He looked from one crewman to the next, his eyes hard and certain. Wilding held his breath while Brainard's glance rested on him. "We're going to need more height in order to lase a signal to somebody who can rescue us. Since we don't have the ascender apparatus any more, we're going to climb that mountain."
He nodded in the direction of the island's hidden peak.
"God almighty, sir!" Caffey gasped. "We can't march through that jungle. Nobody could!"
Brainard looked at the torpedoman. The ensign's face was as calm as the sea, now that the feeding frenzy had burned itself out.
"No, Fish," Brainard said. "We're going to do it. Because that's what we have to do to survive."
* * *
November 6, 381 AS. 1500 hours.
"I don't think," said the Callahan, a man of fifty whose features were as smooth and handsome as the blade of a dress dagger, "that we need wait for the others."
His finger brushed a control hidden in a tabletop carved from a single mother-of-pearl sheet. The chamber's armored door slid shut, separating the Council of the Twelve Families from the crowd of servants in the anteroom.
The panel staggered as it mated with the slot inlet in the jamb. The machinery made a grunching sound.
Hal Wilding looked around the council chamber, cloaking his disgust beneath his usual sardonic smile. Nine of the twelve chairs around the circular table were occupied, but in three cases the occupant was only physically present.
The McLain was senile.
After a series of brutal tongue-lashings by the Callahan, the Hinson had learned to keep his mouth shut during council meetings; a success of some degree for a man with an IQ of 70, but a dog could have been trained more easily.
