by David Drake
K67 hadn't been equipped to support her crew on an overland trek. The rifles and Caffrey's slightly heavier machine-gun were the security blankets with which men convinced themselves that they wouldn't be helpless against enemy gunboats if the twin seventy-fives were put out of action.
OT Wilding had only a pistol. Wilding claimed he couldn't hit anything with it, but Brainard had seen the aristocrat nail the slug while he was running to save Leaf.
As for Leaf. . . .
"Leaf, do you want my pistol?" Brainard said aloud. The handgun was part of an officer's insignia of rank, but Brainard also brought a rifle and bandolier of magazines aboard K67.
The motorman carried his pack at arm's length in one hand and his multitool in the other. He looked at the ensign. Leaf's complexion was sallow beneath its tan. "Naw, I got this," he said and waved the multitool.
"All right, but you're welcome to something that'll shoot," Brainard said.
Leaf resumed his trudge forward. "This'll do for me," he muttered.
Brainard brought up the rear while OT Wilding led the crew through the flame-cleared corridor. They hadn't discussed the arrangements, it just happened that way. Wilding knew what he was doing . . . and he was a born leader, never mind rank.
Brainard remembered to step around one of the black spheres in the path. A shoot which had broken through the baked surface nearby nuzzled the sphere, preparing to rip through the husk and suck whatever nourishment was within.
The sphere exploded with a puff of steam. Barbed rootlets lashed in all directions. Some of them pierced the earth; others seized the shoot that had triggered the sphere's opening.
"Everything all right?" Wilding called from the front of the line.
"A couple plants trying to eat each other," Brainard shouted back.
He tried to look behind him while he still watched where he put his feet. There were too many things he had to see. Even though he'd taken off his environmental suit, his backpack and the laser communicator strapped to his chest restricted his movements.
"Fern spores," Wilding explained. "They get an extra growth spurt from whatever sets them off."
A man's foot would be better a better meal than a bamboo sprout. Sea boots weren't designed to stop steam-driven clusters of needle-sharp roots.
They had to climb to high ground and call for rescue. That was all Brainard knew.
Wilding reached the far end of the flames' hundred-yard path, to where the vegetation was seared but not consumed. Just as the lecturer said, the jungle floor was much more open than that of the unpierced wall, where competition for the abundant light created a solid expanse of foliage.
Brainard looked up. The deadly struggle of branch and vine in the canopy hundreds of feet overhead was the best protection available to men in dim corridors among the trunks beneath. Green shapes moved above him, striving to absorb every needle of sunlight before it could benefit the leaves of rivals below.
"All right," Brainard ordered. "Get your suits off, two at a time. Caffey and Leaf."
The chiefs looked at Brainard, then looked away. Caffey began slowly to unseal his protective garment.
"Now!" Brainard snapped. They would collapse in the first half mile if they tried to climb in the heavy suits. They would die, and he would die with them. . . .
"Sir," begged the motorman. "I'll wear mine, okay? It's all that saved me when, when that pond ate the snake and sp-sp-spider."
"What saved you then, sailor," Wilding said in a tone like a blade of ice, "was obeying your CO's orders to lie still until we could divert your neighbors and pull you clear. You will obey him now—because we can't afford to let you die the way you want to do. Do you understand?"
"Fuck," whispered Leaf. "Fuck it all." He released his multitool on its spring lanyard. He began stripping off his suit. His eyes were closed.
Brainard turned, to keep watch and to hide his face. He didn't know what to do, and when he did know they ignored him. They were all going to die because their commanding officer had no business being an officer.
Something moved in the darkness. Brainard aimed his rifle, then relaxed. Ivy rotated toward the crew from the edges of the cleared area. The tendrils moved like corkscrews, growing from the tips rather than being thrust out from the main body of the vine. A collar of barbed thorns sprouted every time a tendril threw out another trio of leaves.
The barakite flame had burned through the boles of several giant trees, opening the canopy and releasing a flood of sunlight to the forest floor. Energized by the light, the ivy grew at the rate of several inches a minute—amazingly fast, but still no risk to the humans. They'd all have changed out of their suits and gone on before the vines reached them.
Caffey saw the motion. "Watch it!" he shouted. He triggered a burst, firing his machine gun from the hip. Bullets plowed the fire-hardened soil. The muzzle blasts made the foliage quiver as if with anticipation.
"Cease fire!" Brainard shouted. They were never going to make it. "Cease fire!"
Clear, poisonous sap filled and sealed the nip one bullet had taken from a tendril. The tip resumed its rotary advance.
"We'll need that ammo," Brainard muttered to himself.
He glanced up into the canopy to avoid meeting Caffey's eyes. Strands of cobweb drifted there. He hadn't seen it when he looked a moment—
The cobweb was drifting down on them. It was a circular blanket ten feet in diameter, as insubstantial as smoke.
"Move!" Brainard shouted. "Run! Run!"
Wilding glanced upward. "This way!" he cried, leading the way deeper into the jungle.
The crew stampeded forward. Bozman dropped his pack. The cobweb banked lazily around the bole of a forest giant and followed. The humans were hindered by grasping foliage, but the blanket moved in open air beneath the mid-canopy. It easily followed its prey.
Brainard stood transfixed. He didn't know what to do. He opened his mouth to call his men back, but Wilding knew about the dangers, and anyway it was too late.
Brainard should—
Brainard should—
He raised his rifle and fired at the creature a hundred feet in the air. He was a good shot. The yellow muzzle flashes hid the cobweb for an instant, but there was a spark of light as a bullet hit something.
He fired again, another short burst, and the creature curved toward him with the grace of a shark moving in for the kill. Fifty feet, thirty. It gleamed like a diffraction grating as a beam of direct sunlight caught it.
Brainard didn't realize his finger had clamped down on the trigger until the rifle butt abruptly ceased to recoil against his shoulder. He threw down the empty weapon and ran for the nearest cover, the burned-off stump of a fern that had been three hundred feet tall.
The cobweb swooped. The edges of gossamer fabric extended like the wings of a bat driving food to the waiting jaws. Brainard saw the glitter in the corners of both his eyes. The stump was too far to—
An ivy tendril caught him. He tripped forward on his face. He flung his hands out, just short of the stump he had hoped would shelter him.
The creature swept over him as a shimmering shadow. It wrapped itself around the stump.
Brainard stared. The crystal fabric humped itself, driving spikes a foot long into the smoldering wood. The holes released spurts of steam which hung for a moment in the saturated atmosphere.
Wilding ran over to him. "You saved us, sir!" he cried. "That was brilliant! You saved us all!"
Brainard gaped at Wilding. He moved his foot in a disconnected attempt at removing it from the ivy's hooked grasp.
* * *
July 23, 381 AS. 0244 hours.
Officer-Trainee Brainard's console was a holographic triptych.
To the right, between Brainard and Watkins, K67's coxswain, the navigation board displayed the Gehenna Archipelago. Tonello's hovercraft and her consort, K44, probed for the Seatiger squadron which Cinc Wysocki believed was lurking there in ambush. Low islands and shallow straits scrolled down the
panel of coherent light.
Brainard bent close to the left-hand panel which displayed schematics of the torpedocraft's signatures:
Thermal—
Fan #3's intake glowed 4o above ambient. Brainard touched keys to reroute the overdeck airflow, scattering the warmth in turbulence. Leaf, hunched over against the wind, ran toward the drive module to work on the underlying problem.
Electro-optical—
All the hovercraft's emitters were shut down. The blotched gray polymer of K67's hull quivered at between an 83% and 95% match for the surrounding sea in color and albedo. That was a closer copy than stretches of seawater a mile apart could achieve.
The vessel's computer fed low-voltage current through connections to the hull and skirts, modifying the camouflage pattern by the plastic's response to its electrical charge. It didn't require operator input.
Audio—
K67's sonic signature required an act of God to do it any good. There was damn-all Brainard could even attempt now that the CO had called for flank speed. Intake baffles flattened to smooth the path of air howling to feed the fans. Wind rush—over the deck, the gun tub, the cockpit and the crew stations—blended its myriad turbulences into the roar. Exhaust flow, ducted at high velocity to drive the vessel forward, hammered the night.
You couldn't have speed and silence. The best you could do was diffuse the cacophony so that it might come from anywhere in a mile radius instead of giving the enemy a sharp aiming point.
Brainard was doing what he could with the low on-deck air dams. He thought he'd shifted the calculated center of noise starboard and 3o astern, though the sonic ghost-vessel would keep a parallel course. Maybe the line of swampy islands a mile to starboard on the navigation screen would produce a confusing echo, but that was a matter for luck—temperature and air currents, nothing that a hovercraft's electronic countermeasures operator could do.
But something had to be done. Cinc Wysocki had been right. Brainard's center screen showed that the Seatigers had at least a pair of heavily-armed hydrofoil gunboats in the archipelago, five miles away and closing on the Herd patrol at 42o off the port bow.
Brainard heard the boonk! over the wind roar, but he didn't recognize the sound until the high-altitude pop followed three seconds later and the heavens turned lambent white in the glare of a star shell. The gunboats opened fire.
K44's gun tub fired back.
Brainard was lost in the virtual environment of his console. Nothing was real, not even the coxswain and Lieutenant Tonello beside him in the narrow cockpit. K44's signature brightened by ten orders of magnitude near the center of the situation display.
"Don't shoot!" he screamed. "For God's sake, don't!"
Outside the cockpit, the Seatiger gunboats disappeared behind the dazzle of their tracers and muzzle flashes. Each hydrofoil mounted a 3-inch gun in the bow and 1-inch Gatlings in tubs abaft the cockpit to either side. On the gunboats' present closing course, all their weapons could fire.
K44's tracers mounted in a high arc as the gunner attempted to achieve an impossible range. The scarlet marker compound burned out before the bullets started their vain downward tumble.
"Tonello to crew," rasped the CO's voice, distorted by static on the interphone's masking circuit. "Do not fire. Yee, I've locked the gun tub. Do not attempt to fire. Break. Blue Leader to—"
Brainard screamed silently as a pip glowed on the signature display. It was all right, tight-beam laser directed at K44 as Tonello gave orders to their consort, but nothing was all right.
"—Blue Two, cease fire and—"
K67 staggered. There was a bang and a puff of hot gas at the port bow on Brainard's thermal schematic. The CO had fired a decoy from the spigot mortar there.
"—conform to my movements. Out."
The sky ripped and roared. White streaks quivered like heat lightning in Brainard's peripheral vision. A sheet of spray lifted just ahead of the hovercraft, better shielding than anything the console provided, but the whack/whack from low in the hull added noise drumming through a double hole in the plenum chamber.
The decoy bloomed into a satisfying blob on Brainard's situation display, but centrifugal force shoved him to the left and the ghost image he had created on the audio schematic vanished in the modified airstream. Watkin's elbow blurred the navigation display for a moment as the coxswain fought to hold K67 in a tight starboard turn.
Brainard braced himself and began reworking their sonic signature. The CO was headed for the strait separating a pair of islands like pearls on a necklace. The hovercraft of the Herd patrol had thirty knots on their hydrofoil opponents, but Tonello was determined to hunt the narrow confines of the archipelago rather than return to Cinc Wysocki with word of a pair of screening vessels.
A triple crackling noise vibrated K67. Brainard's left-hand display vanished, then resumed before the curse reached his lips and his finger could stab the back-up control.
The islands would blur the hovercraft's horrifying racket. Maneuvering in tight waters was the CO's concern, not Brainard's.
Brainard had to concentrate on eliminating the torpedocraft's signatures.
Or he would die.
The night to the left exploded in hard white flashes as a gunboat slammed its six-round burst into a skerry as K67 roared past. Fragments of rock, shell-casing, and barnacles three feet in diameter sprang into the air. They rained down on the hovercraft's deck. Shreds of barnacle flesh gave the air a fishy tinge and brought shoals of toothed creatures to the surface.
The firing was behind them. A series of low islands concealed the gunboats from K67's sensors. K44 had managed to join her leader, but hot spots on Brainard's situation display indicated the other hovercraft had battle damage.
"Tonello to crew!" the CO crackled over the interphone. "The Seatigers may think this is a great place to hide, but we'll see how well they dodge torpedoes in narrow waters!"
Something touched Brainard's shoulder. He turned around in shock. Tonello had loosened his harness in order to lean over to the countermeasures console.
The CO raised his visor and shouted over the wind rush, "Brainard, I've never known a man to stay so cool in his first action. I'm proud to have you aboard!"
Tonello swung back into his own seat.
Brainard stared at him. The CO's words had been distinct, but they didn't make any sense.
Wind buffeted Brainard at chest height. He shut down the signature display for a moment. There was a circular one-inch hole in the plastic behind the holographic panel.
Brainard wondered dully how the Gatling bullet had managed to miss him on the continuation of its course.
7
May 17, 382 AS. 1634 hours.
Wilding offered Brainard a hand. Brainard stared as if he were unable to comprehend the gesture.
The enlisted members of the crew ran back to their officers. Leaf picked up Brainard's rifle by the sling and demanded, "What was that? What the hell was that?"
"Goddam if I know," the ensign said in an emotionless voice. He levered himself to his knees, then stood upright. His bandolier swayed, making the magazines clatter against one another.
Wilding rubbed his hand on his thigh to give it something to do. "It's an ice mat," he said, looking at the crystalline form. Pale, stunted shoots sprang from nodes over the spikes driven into the tree. "A seed pod of sorts. It's descended from a thistle—the parent plant is, I mean."
Brainard took his rifle from Leaf. He touched the barrel; winced as the hot metal burned him. "All right," he said. "Let's get moving."
Wilding had forgotten the weight of the pack during the moments of panic. Now the straps cut into his shoulders. He was suddenly sure that the forty-pound loads which he had set—conservatively, he thought—were too heavy, at least for him.
"Yes sir," he said as strode back into the jungle.
The edges of the cleared area were already a tangle of thorns and poison. Wilding reopened the path with the powered cutting bar he carried,
one of the two in K67's equipment locker before the crash. Caffey fell in behind him with the machine-gun.
"But it was alive," Leaf insisted from mid-way back in the line. "It wasn't just falling, it was coming for us."
"It doesn't have a mind," Wilding said. He knew he should concentrate on the terrain in front of him, but a part of his mind insisted that he dwell on Ensign Brainard's cold courage. "It has a very discriminating infra-red sensor, though. It would have avoided an open flame, but the CO lured it into a charred stump that had cooled to just above blood heat."
That was the second part of what Brainard had done. First, while Wilding ran in terror thinking, Let it take one of the others, the CO used the hot, expanding propellant gases of his rifle to draw the ice mat toward himself. Brainard's combination of nerve and diamond-hard calculation was almost beyond conception.
The interphone only worked through K67's computer, but the visor-display compasses in the helmets were self-powered. Wilding set his on a vector to the peak. He began to follow it.
Almost immediately, the ground lurched up in an outcrop too steep for the thin soil to cling to its surface. Wilding gripped rock, lifted himself, and kicked for a foothold from which he could push up the rest of the way.
A gigantic fig overhung the outcrop. The lower twenty feet of its folded bark bubbled with bright red spittle. A colony of scale insects hid within the frothy protection.
"Don't touch the red!" Wilding shouted. "Anything that showy is probably poisonous."
"Give me a hand," Caffey said peremptorily. "Sir." He lifted his machine-gun.
Wilding grasped it by the barrel. He almost overbalanced. The gun weighed nearly thirty pounds with its ammunition drum.
The torpedoman clambered up the rock and took the weapon back. He bent to offer Yee, the third man in line, a hand.
A stand of yellow-barked willows was in the direct path. Wilding skirted them. There was a broad corridor through the copse, but bones and the sections of insect exoskeleton there showed its danger.
