by David Drake
The seaman giggled. He leaped from the bed, spinning and cutting at the air. He had left the bedding behind. Contractions ran across his nude body, sharply defining alternate groups of muscles.
Mooker's skin shone with sweat although the room's environmental system was working normally. Leaf and Caffey backed as far away as they could get in the small room.
The seaman stood against the door, drawing disjointed patterns with the cutting bar. One swipe struck the corner of a locker. The blade caught momentarily. Leaf tensed, but Mooker dragged the weapon clear with a convulsive effort. He waggled it toward the noncom.
Caffey fumbled in his tunic pocket.
The seaman stared fixedly at him. The cutting bar nodded. Its blunt tip was less than a yard from the torpedoman's face.
Mooker slashed behind himself without looking around.
Leaf dodged back, barely in time. He was sweating also.
"Hey, Leaf," said Caffey. He was balancing a drug injector on his thumb. "You want one a these?"
The seaman froze. Behind Mooker's back, Leaf reached to his own collar and ripped off one of the rank insignia studs.
Caffey flipped the drug injector. The cone of gray plastic wobbled over Mooker's head. Leaf caught and palmed it as the seaman turned.
"Give me . . . ," Mooker demanded in a voice that would have sounded unexpectedly bestial even coming from a wolverine. He raised the cutting bar. Blood from his severed toe pooled on the floor around him.
"Sure, Mookie," Leaf said. He flicked his rank insignia onto the upper bunk.
Mooker trembled like a drive motor lugging. Caffey's mouth opened to scream, but at the last instant the seaman leaped for the bed.
Leaf snatched the door open. Both noncoms slipped into the corridor and slammed the door behind them.
The thunderous music resumed almost at once.
"My God," Leaf groaned. His eyes were closed. "My God, I didn't think. . . ."
"Shit," said Caffey. "No choice but the Shore Police now—omigod!"
Lieutenant-Commander Congreve strode down the corridor to them. He wore a dress uniform; his saucer hat was adjusted perfectly to the required tilt.
"What in the hell is going on here?" Congreve demanded. He did not so much shout as raise his cold voice to be heard over the chant booming from Mooker's billet.
Leaf and Caffey snapped to attention. Leaf hoped the other noncom could think of a way to explain—
But Congreve didn't want explanations, he wanted victims. There were a lot of officers like that. . . .
"You! Leaf!" Congreve said. "Open your hands."
"Sir, it's not—" Leaf said as he obeyed. The unused injector dropped to the floor.
Congreve glared at him. "The first thing you can do is take off the other rank stud, Seaman Leaf," he said. "You won't be needing it for a long time—if ever. Now, just what is going on here?"
Leaf swallowed. He was braced so stiffly that he was becoming dizzy, as though being rigid would protect him from what was happening.
"Ah, sir," said Caffey. "It's just, you know, a little party."
The lieutenant-commander's face went red, then white. He stared at the name tape on Caffey's tunic. "Well," he said in a voice of dangerous calm, "we'll just see about that."
Congreve pushed open the door of the billet and said, "All right, stand at—"
The scream and the whine of the cutting bar played a descant to the rumbling bass line from the recorder.
Leaf pulled the door closed. "Let's get the fuck outa here," he said.
14
May 18, 382 AS. 0622 hours.
Filters of cyan, magenta, and yellow shifted across Wilding's vision with every beat of his heart. After hundreds of repetitions, the colors locked suddenly into a polychrome whole. The officer-trainee watched Ensign Brainard take a grenade out of his tunic pocket.
A pair of grenades turned up when Wilding searched K67's ammunition locker. Nobody remembered why they were aboard. Maybe to discourage sea life, maybe because somebody had the notion they'd be useful if the hovercraft's crew had to board another vessel—a vanishingly improbable event.
But the survivors needed them now.
Brainard grimaced, tossing the grenade an inch or two on his palm to judge its heft. He stepped toward the giant cedar. Caffey and Leaf fell in beside him. They were trying to look in all directions at once.
"I said, 'Get to cover,'" the ensign ordered harshly.
The torpedoman opened his mouth to protest.
"I'll have five seconds after I pull this," Brainard said. His finger tapped the grenade's safety pin. "I don't intend to spend it tripping over you two. Get to cover."
"Yessir," said Leaf. He touched the back of Caffey's hand on the machine-gun grip. Both noncoms shuffled past the roots of the fallen log in whose shelter the remainder of the crew waited.
Brainard disappeared into the sucking undergrowth.
K67's commanding officer was the only reason most of the hovercraft's crew was still alive. Brainard's absolute courage—and his coldly reasoned certainty when anyone else would have been in a blind panic—kept them all going.
"Jeez, I hope this works," Wheelwright muttered.
His hands squeezed the grip and fore-end of his rifle so fiercely that his knuckles were blotched. A grub poked its three-inch head through the bark of the fallen tree and rotated toward the young sailor. "I want to get outa here so bad."
Barakite was extremely stable under most conditions. A bullet impact would only splash a crater in the doughy explosive. Flame would ignite it; but a fire, although intense, would not topple the giant cypress.
To do that, they needed to detonate the barakite—and K67 hadn't carried blasting caps. A grenade placed directly against the explosive might provide the necessary combination of heat and shock to set off the daisy-chain.
The part of Wilding's mind which was not dissociated by pain and fever prayed that it would.
Caffey crushed the grub with the butt of his machine-gun as he slid in beside his striker. "Hell, we got this far, didn't we?" he said. "Now we just sit for an hour or two and let somebody else do all the work."
The log had been the trunk of an ebony ten feet in diameter—a large tree by any standards short of those which included the dominant cypress. Branches of the ebony and cypress had battled for sunlight. Slowly but inexorably, the cypress levered its rival sideways. Finally, aided by a squall, the giant ripped the ebony's roots from the soil and toppled it in splendid ruin.
The dense log was fresh enough to cover the humans as they avenged the ebony's murder.
"Fire in the hole!" Brainard shouted. Foliage muffled his voice and the crashing progress of his run for cover.
Wilding drifted again through pallid filters. Images of Brainard with the grenade merged with his memories of the Board of Review. Then Brainard was an officer-trainee like Wilding, younger by a few years and with only few more months of service in the Herd.
Wilding watched in awe. Brainard never boasted, never grew defensive. He answered questions with such simple precision that it was only in the words of his crewmen that Brainard's icy heroism became apparent.
Wilding had never met a man like that in twenty-five years of living as a prince in Wyoming Keep. As clearly as an epiphany, Wilding knew that he must beg or bribe his way into the executive officer slot aboard Brainard's vessel. That way even Prince Hal might be able to learn the traits of manhood. . . .
A flatworm, mottled and a yard long, rose from the leaf mold as Brainard dodged past the ebony's root ball. The worm fastened momentarily to the laser communicator strapped to the ensign's chest.
Leaf shouted in fury. Brainard crushed the creature against him with a swipe of his rifle butt. It fell writhing. Brainard flung himself down beside the others.
White light flashed across the underside of the leaves. An instant later, the sharp crash of the explosion shocked the jungle to silence.
"Thank God . . ." Caffey murmured.
"Yippee!" cried Newton. He jumped to his feet. Brainard grabbed the coxswain's belt. Newton was too strong for one man to bring down, but Brainard clung for a moment until Leaf and Caffey added their weight.
Newton slammed to the ground with a curse. Dirt, rocks, and chunks of vegetation kicked skyward by the explosion broke like a storm over the humans.
The sudden destruction drove the jungle berserk. Images printed across Wilding's fever in a surreal montage:
A phalanx of three-yard-long katydids crashed through the undergrowth. The flightless insects ran on four legs and scraped the middle pair deafeningly against their modified wing cases.
Caustic green liquid slurped from the hollow core of a cottonwood, then siphoned back into its hiding place. It left smoldering scars across the bark as it withdrew.
A thirty-foot serpent with eyes like fire opals plunged from high in the canopy. As the snake fell, it twisted to strike repeatedly at its own red-banded body.
A hundred other tragedies glimpsed simultaneously. Thousands more hidden in the massive chaos.
The rain of debris pattered to a halt. The noise of the falling tree continued. Ensign Brainard got to his feet and shambled forward. The able-bodied members of the crew followed . . . and Officer-Trainee Wilding rose as well.
The pain in his ankle no longer registered. Wilding drifted on a cloud as pink as sunset. When he rounded the roots of the fallen ebony, the air was thick with the odors of barakite and pulverized dirt.
The explosion had not been enough to destroy the gigantic cypress, but it had caused the tree to destroy itself. Despite its thick trunk, the cypress was as carefully poised as a skyscraper. The blast shattered the support structures on one side while giving the enormous mass a violent shove in the opposite direction.
Gravity did the rest. When the cypress overbalanced, it ripped out the remainder of its roots and slid two thousand feet down an angle-of-repose slope into the bay beneath. The air above the track was gray with dust, pulverized life, and creatures leaping and swooping to gain advantage in the sudden No-man's-land.
The water boiled where cypress branches thrust into the shallows. Sea life was quick to accept the bounty which chance had thrust into its jaws.
"Move," Wilding whispered. "Move. . . ."
Every time Wilding's right foot touched the ground, the world became sepia-toned. Full color returned when he took his weight on his left leg and the makeshift crutch. Still he felt no pain.
The cypress, like most trees growing in thin jungle soils, had wrapped its roots across the surface instead of driving them deep into rock that was bare of nourishment. Even so, the giant took a great bite of ridge line along when it fell. Boulders shook free of the roots which gripped them and bounded in separate arcs through the jungle. The crew of K67 skirted the left side of the crater.
"Hey!" somebody cried. Wilding heard the crewmen's voices shifted up several octaves, by fever or by the ear-punishing blast. "There's a boat down there!"
At first glance, Wilding's heart leaped with hope that gilded what he saw. He shifted the magnifying function of his helmet visor to x20 and looked again.
It was still a boat, a hovercraft. But there was no hope at all.
The vessel was beached—almost beached—several hundred feet west of the seething ruin which the cypress had torn to the bay. It rode very low. Its skirts grounded where the water off the shelving beach was still three feet deep, and the crew had been unable or unwilling to bring their craft ashore.
Instead, the shore had come to them.
Honeysuckle ruled the low ground behind the belt of salt-drenched sand on this side of the island. The foliage moved softly, turning toward the opportunity provided by the cypress' clearing operation. A bridge of vines was arched across the sand to the hovercraft.
The vessel appeared undamaged to the naked eye. Magnification showed that honeysuckle covered all the plastic surfaces in a thin mat. The leaves were brown and shrunken. The colonizing vine had become dormant while it awaited further sustenance.
"Sir, did they come for us?" squealed a foolish, hopeful voice. "Are they going to pick us up?"
Dust settled along the track of the cypress. The flailing roots had dragged torn-up material along, depositing it in a series of clumps and valleys like an oscilloscope pattern. Because the slope still vibrated with the tree's impact, the mounds continued to settle.
Something moved near the bottom of the track. It was big enough to be a shifting mass of vegetation, but it was coming uphill.
"Caffey, set up a tight perimeter," squeaked Ensign Brainard. "We're in the open here, and that's not entirely good. Leaf—"
Wilding stepped closer to the edge. His helmet enhanced as well as magnifying the image. Mimosa fronds waved in the middle of the slope, but Wilding could not see what was beyond them.
No herbivore was likely to be racing to inspect the site of an explosion.
The ridge dropped sharply for a hundred feet, then splayed outward in a marshy knob where water seeped through a fold in rock layers. The cypress had hung there for a moment. When it continued its long slide to the sea, the tree scraped the knob to mud.
Two hundred feet below the smear of flattened marsh, a pile of broken alders shuddered. A forked, black-and-yellow tongue, as long as a man was high, flicked over the wrack to sample the air.
"Get back!" Wilding screamed. His own voice was only the upper sideband of human speech. "Run! Something's coming!"
The head of a monitor lizard, the dominant land predator of the planet, twisted over the alders. The pile of debris scattered beneath the monster's eight-ton weight. Its tongue continued to slip in and out like light quivering over a swordblade.
Wilding stared into the lizard's magnified jaws. The cone-shaped teeth were six inches long, and the yellow gullet was large enough to swallow a man whole.
"Get back!" he screamed, but this time he was speaking to himself. The soil gave way beneath his left foot; his right held for a moment. When the right ankle buckled, the officer-trainee began to float effortlessly, through the air—
Down toward the fifty-foot lizard.
* * *
July 23, 382 AS. 0344 hours.
Officer-Trainee Wilding heard the shells howl.
The sound was more penetrating than the crash of the Mouflon's main batteries or even the drumming bass note of 1-inch Gatlings trying to claw the incoming out of the air before it hit the cruiser.
He looked up from his console, trying instinctively to see through the armored ceiling. His mouth was open.
Two Seatiger shells burst in the storm of fire from the automatic weapons. The other four slammed into the Mouflon's bridge and forward hull.
There was a green flash. All the lights went out. Wilding felt his buttocks lift from his chair. He had no sense of direction. The air smelled burned, and the shockwaves of the blast were so severe that he felt them as pressure, not as noise.
Wilding hit his chair again. The emergency lights went on, yellow strips set into the deck and ceiling moldings. Wilding's console hummed and flickered as it re-created the display affected by the power interrupt.
Blue tungsten-sulphide letters on the margin of the display switched from BACK-UP to PRIMARY.
The regular gunnery officer, a senior lieutenant, sprawled at the console beside Wilding's. His face wore a surprised expression. One of the shell impacts had flexed the armored ceiling enough to spall fragments across the bridge. A saucer-sized disk whacked through the lieutenant's neck, then sawed his workstation into sparkling ruin.
Wilding was now gunnery officer for the Mouflon's starboard automatic weapons, though computers would fire the weapons unless Wilding chose to override their electronic decisions.
The Mouflon rippled off a salvo from her twelve 8
-inch guns. Her hull twisted like a snake from the recoil stresses.
Captain Glenn got to his feet. His left shoulder was bleeding. His good hand pawed aimlessly.
Glenn's eyes focused. He looked down at the deck, picked up his commo helmet, and slapped it back in place over his short-cropped hair. "Damage report," he ordered harshly.
"Hull nominal," said Collor, the Mouflon's executive officer. "Main battery nominal. Fires in three forward compartments, controllable at present." Collor looked up from his holographic display. In the same dry voice as before, he concluded, "Thirty percent damage to bridge command-and-control installations, but back-up systems are in place."
Shock had unbonded a ten-foot swath of sound-deadening foam from the ceiling. Damage-control personnel sawed at the fallen blanket to get it out of the way.
The foam was dense and twelve inches thick. It was supposed to be able to trap spalled fragments. It hadn't done its job well enough for Wilding's immediate superior. . . .
The Mouflon writhed with another outgoing salvo. Burning propellant expanded the gun breeches; they rang like huge bells.
Wilding's console indicated that no further Seatiger shells were in the air. The Gatlings were silent for want of targets.
Wilding's mouth was dry. He made an effort of will to close it. For a moment, he couldn't remember why he sat so rigidly in his chair. He was afraid that if he tried to move, his head would slip from his shoulders and bounce to the console, the way the lieutenant's had done. . . .
"Sir," said the lieutenant-commander in charge of communications. He reached over with the sheet of hard copy which his console had just run off.
Captain Glenn bent to take the flimsy. "Wait!" chirped the medic cutting away the back of Glenn's jacket. Glenn shouted a curse, reacting to the pain of the forgotten wound rather than the medic's order.
"First bloody time I wore this uniform," Glenn muttered as he snatched the print-out with his right hand. "First bloody time."
The eight-inch guns salvoed again. Each tube fired a half-second behind the next previous. The firing sequence spaced the shockwaves and avoided a simultaneous recoil which would do more damage to the Mouflon than an enemy shell.
