Seas of Venus

by David Drake

  Wilding felt the motorman force down his right arm; gently at first, but with increasing firmness as the officer-trainee resisted. "Come on, sir," Leaf muttered. "We don't wanna stop just yet."

  Wilding giggled. "Nope, we can't afford to stop," he said. "We've got to keep the common people interested, but we can't give them anything real to be interested in. Isn't that right? We can't stop!"

  A facet of Wilding's mind knew that he was raving, but that facet was in charge only during brief flashes. The last of the analgesics had worn off hours earlier, but Wilding still felt no pain; only pressure. Pressure that seemed to swell his skin to the bursting point.

  "C'mon, sir," said Leaf. "Just a little farther, and it's all on the flat now."

  Wilding let himself be guided by the motorman's arm. They were on sand, so it was hard to walk. The muzzle of the rifle Wilding used as a crutch dug into the yielding surface, punching divots and threatening to let him overbalance.

  Wheelwright had burned the interior of his rifle barrel smooth with the long bursts he poured into the monitor lizard. Wilding used that weapon as a crutch, and Wheelwright carried the spare that had been Bozman's rifle. . . .

  The beach was about fifty feet in width at this stage of the solar tide. The remainder of K67's crew stood in the middle of the strip of sand, staring from a safe distance at the hovercraft and its tracery of honeysuckle.

  "I say we just run across it," suggested Caffey. "The vines, they're dead, but they'll hold us till we get to the ship. Just like they was a bridge."

  "No," said Ensign Brainard.

  The cypress lay in the surf a hundred yards from the humans. A school of flying frogs swept back and forth over the tree's path down the slope.

  There were never less than two of the vividly-colored amphibians in the air at any one time. At least a dozen were involved, but after a few passes each frog sailed back to the shadows to wet itself in the pools at the heart of spiky bromeliads. Generally the frogs would not venture into sunlight filtered only by the atmosphere, but the disaster had put up enormous numbers of small insects on which the frogs fed.

  "Beautiful . . . ," Wilding murmured again.

  "The end shoots will regenerate as soon as we get within fifty feet of them," Brainard said. "Mr Wilding can tell you."

  Wilding tittered. His mind did not think that his lips made any sound.

  Brainard pointed toward the bridge of honeysuckle with the first and second fingers of his left hand. Fresh leaves gleamed green against the ropes of brown stems. They moved very slowly, as if only the wind animated them.

  "Look what's happening already," he said. "We'd get aboard, but we'd never get back. Believe me. To grow, that plant can pump food through its veins at the speed of a firehose."

  Leaf looked at the hard-faced ensign. "You seen it, then, sir?" the motorman asked in puzzlement.

  Wilding watched the other humans; watched the hovercraft; and watched the frogs overhead. The three images were pallid except where one chanced to encompass part of another. Overlaid viewpoints had rich colors and sharp lines.

  "Yeah," said Ensign Brainard. "I've seen it."

  The sea's gentle, back-and-forth motion hardened with stalked eyes, then claws stained shades of blue and lavender. Crabs edged sideways onto the sand, skittering a yard forward and half that distance back.

  Their spike-edged shells were three feet across. There were already dozens of them on shore. More eyes peeked out of the water.

  "Bet it'll burn," suggested Caffey. "The vine, I mean, dry as it is now. The boat, it's fireproof t'anything up to a thousand degrees."

  The frogs flew by rhythmic motions of the skin stretched from their wrists to their hind feet. They retained their fore-paddles as canard rudders which allowed them to turn and bank with astonishing quickness in pursuit of their prey.

  "You wouldn't think an amphibian could fly without drying out, would you, Leaf?" Wilding heard his voice say. "Even in an atmosphere as saturated as this is. Isn't nature wonderful?"

  "If it burns," protested Leaf, "then how do we get aboard? Have them carry us?"

  He gestured toward the crabs with his multitool.

  One of the crustaceans scuttled ten feet closer to the humans, then raced back toward the sea in a spray of sand.

  Newton raised his rifle. He fired at the crab. His bullets cracked the carapace and broke the lower jaw of one pincer so that the saw-toothed edge hung askew on its fibers of internal muscle.

  "Dumb shit!" Caffey shouted. "How much ammo you think we got left?"

  The injured crab reached the edge of the sea before the weight of her fellows brought her down. They flailed the water in their haste to rend the sudden victim. Successful crabs raised long strips of pale meat in their claws, then sidled away to shred their sister further in their swiftly-moving mouth parts.

  "Look," growled Newton. "I hate 'em. Okay? Just keep off my back!"

  A facet of Wilding's mind giggled at the fire discipline which the trek had hammered into K67's crew; a facet watched the wheeling frogs; and the facet in control of his muscles for the moment said crisply, "No, that was right. They would have rushed us very soon. Newton provided something else to occupy them."

  The coxswain looked at Wilding and grinned shyly. Newton's stolid strength was so great, even now, that he hadn't bothered to shrug off his pack while they paused for consideration. "Thanks sir," he said. "Things with claws, I just. . . ."

  "Fish is right," said Ensign Brainard, returning to the problem at hand. "The core stems are still full of sap in case there's a chance to grow. They won't burn, so we'll have the bridge to cross on. But all the tendrils will go, and that should slow down the regrowth. A lot. I think enough."

  "It's a jungle out there," Officer-Trainee Wilding said to the crabs furiously demolishing their fellow. "It's a jungle everywhere, did you know?"

  This time the laugh was internal but he spoke aloud the words, "It's a jungle in the Keeps, too. Especially in the Keeps."

  "Right," said Brainard, putting the cap on his thoughts in his usual, coldly decisive fashion. "To make sure it ignites, we'll need to get a flame into the really dry portion, but it'll blaze back very quickly. What we need is a wad of barakite we can throw. Leaf, do we have any more?"

  A machine could act as decisively; but no machine intelligence could process the scraps of available data into the survival of six human beings under the present conditions. . . .

  The motorman winced as though he had been struck. "Sir, I'm sorry," he said, "but I cleaned out ever'body else when we blew up the tree, and the last bit. . . ."

  "Don't apologize for following my orders, Technician," Brainard snapped.

  The sand quivered slowly down the beach toward the humans. If Wilding had been limited to a single viewpoint, he would not have noticed it. When two images merged like a stereo pair, the trembling line was evident.

  Brainard ran his fingertip down the front seam of his tunic, unsealing it. "This fabric's processed from cellulose. It should burn well enough."

  "Newton," Wilding ordered. "Give me a magazine for this rifle."

  "Sir!" said Leaf in concern. "Don't try t'shoot that without we knock the dirt outa the muzzle."

  The coxswain handed Wilding a loaded magazine without comment or apparent interest. Wilding locked it home in the receiver well without lifting his "crutch." The muzzle brake was completely buried.

  Ensign Brainard took his tunic off. There were dozens of puckered sores on his arms and among the hairs of his chest. "Weighted with a little sand," he said aloud, "we'll be able to throw it aboard K44 from halfway along the honeysuckle bridge. That should do."

  Wilding retracted the charging handle and let it clang forward, loading the rifle. "Help me walk," he ordered Leaf curtly.

  "Sir . . . ?" pleaded the motorman. He sighed and took his share of Wilding's weight. The officer-trainee stumped toward an event no one else was aware of.

  "Better let me handle that, sir," Caffey said to
the ensign. "It's going to backfire pretty quick, and—"

  "Thank you, Technician," Brainard said, "but it's my job."

  Both the thanks and the assertion were as false as a politician's faith. The ensign straightened, knotting the sleeve of his tunic to hold the weight inside. Sand dribbled out through tears in the fabric.

  Wilding slanted his rifle outward and drove the muzzle deep in the sand. His surroundings were a montage of images in which nothing was clear. "Is it ready to fire, Leaf?" he demanded. "Is it off safe?"

  "Yeah," said the motorman, "but for chrissake, sir—"

  "Leaf," Ensign Brainard ordered, "give me your multitool for a—Wilding! What the hell are you doing?"

  The line in the beach steadied, then merged with the pimple raised from the sand around the rifle muzzle. The surface mounded as something rose through it, drawn by vibration and pressure which compacted a point of the beach.

  Hard chitin clacked against the steel muzzle brake as a shock drove the weapon upward. Wilding pulled the trigger.

  The sound of the shot was muffled, but the sand exploded as if a grenade had gone off. Recoil knocked Wilding backward despite the motorman's attempt to hold him.

  The magazine flew out. The muzzle brake was gone. Excessive pressure sprayed the cartridge casing in fragments and vapor from the ejection port, but the breech did not rupture.

  A hand-sized fragment of bloody chitin lay in the center of the disturbed area. Instead of surfacing, the creature drove down in a series of circles that widened, leaving ever-fainter traces on the beach above. A line shivering toward the humans from the other direction changed course to intercept its injured peer.

  Everyone else stared at Wilding. "It's a jungle," he repeated in a high, cheerful voice. "But it's our jungle too."

  Leaf bent to help Wilding rise. In the same tone, the officer-trainee added, "There's a hand flare in Newton's pack. I put it there. We'll use that, don't you think. So that we torch the honeysuckle. And not the hero." He chortled.

  Brainard shook his head as if to clear cobwebs. "Do you have a flare, Newton?" he asked.

  "Huh?" said the coxswain. "I dunno."

  Caffey reached into Newton's pack. His hand came out with a short plastic baton: a flare, marked White Star Cluster. "Jeez," the torpedoman said. "We're golden!"

  Of course we're golden, said Officer-Trainee Wilding. We're being led by a hero.

  But no words came out of his mouth, only laughter.

  * * *

  July 3, 379 AS. 0912 hours.

  Prince Hal's coach, one of less than a hundred private vehicles in Wyoming Keep, bulked in the midst of Patrol scooters like the termite queen in a crowd of her workers.

  A score of emergency flashers pulsed nervously. Each light had a different rate and sequence. The combination would drive a saint to fury.

  Wilding jumped from his vehicle without waiting for his chauffeur's hand. The warehouse's double doors were flung back. Kenran, the Wilding major domo, stood in the entrance wringing his hands as Patrol personnel walked in and out of the building.

  It was a moment before Kenran's eyes registered the arrival of his master. His face wrenched itself into a combination of misery and relief. "Oh, sir!" he cried, "it's terrible! Terrible what they did!"

  "What who did?" Wilding demanded as he strode into the family warehouse. "Just what in heaven's name is going on?"

  "Excuse me, sir," said a stocky man with close-cropped gray hair. He stepped between Wilding and the major domo with a studied nonchalance. "I'm Captain Petersen. Would you be the Wilding?"

  "My father's indisposed," Wilding snapped. "I'm the family's representative, if that's what you mean. Now, get out of my—"

  He put his hand on the stranger's chest to push him aside. The momentary contact shocked Wilding in two ways: Petersen didn't move; and although Petersen wore good-quality—though drab—civilian clothes, there was a pistol in a shoulder holster beneath his tunic.

  "I'm in charge of the investigation, sir," said Petersen as he stepped aside so smoothly that he seemed never to have been in the way. "You're welcome to enter, of course; but you'll understand that we don't want a mob of civilians making a bad situation worse."

  "Why was it my servants who noticed the damage?" Wilding demanded as he walked into the warehouse. "Isn't that what we pay the Patrol to—good God!"

  "Oh, sir!" Kenran wailed. "It's terrible!"

  "We check the doors of these warehouses every few hours, sir," said Petersen as he followed Wilding into the building. "We don't bother with the back as a general rule, except to run off vagrants. With Carnival, we've been pretty busy, so it was your people who found the trouble when they opened up this morning."

  The Patrol had set up additional lights, supplementing those integral to the warehouse. The combined glare turned the interior into a harsh, shadowless pit. It looked like a bomb site. Uniformed personnel recorded the scene and sifted through the debris while Wilding Family servants stood by in shock.

  "We didn't think you could get through these walls without blowing the whole building to bits," Petersen went on. "Of course, with what they did when they got inside, they might as well have blasted it to smithereens."

  Desks of light metal and thermoplastic: hacked or sawn apart, probably with cutting bars. Chairs of similar flimsy construction: smashed, every one of them. Crates with padded interiors: ripped open, and the fixtures they contained hurled onto the floor to be stepped upon.

  There was a hole in the back wall of the warehouse, a square so regular that Wilding thought for a moment it was part of the building's design. The edges of cast ceramic were so sharp that they winked in the cruel light. The thieves, the vandals, had somehow cut a neat hole in a wall that should have been able to resist cannon fire. . . .

  "How?" Wilding whispered. His soul felt empty. The universe had turned to face him, and her face was a skull.

  "We're still not sure of that, sir," Petersen said. " 'Why' is a bit of a question also, but we think they were looking for valuables, didn't find any, and wrecked what was here out of anger. Are these the normal contents of this warehouse?"

  "No!" said Wilding. His face clouded as he tried to think. "But I'm not sure what's usually here, that's not my. . . ."

  "Liquor for the party was stored here until the night before last," Kenran said. His voice steadied as it was permitted to deal with normal business matters. "The Family gives a Carnival party in its home, open to everyone in the keep who wishes to come. The quantity of beverages that entails is too great to store on the premises until the event, of course."

  Petersen nodded in satisfaction. "Bingo," he said. "They knew about the booze, broke in some damn way, and missed what they were looking for by twenty-four hours."

  He surveyed the wreckage again before adding, "So there was nothing left here but this old furniture?"

  Wilding went pale. He couldn't speak.

  "You, you—" Kenran stammered, "—idiot! Don't you know what this was? It was Settlement Period furniture! It came from Earth!"

  "Oh, my God," Petersen said in a reverent tone. For the first time, the Patrol captain's look of cold propriety gave way to genuine concern.

  Wilding stared at the hole in the warehouse wall. "With thousands of common people in the house," he said numbly, "we couldn't have irreplaceable artifacts like these out where they might be broken. We always store them in the warehouse for safekeeping."

  Petersen shook his head. "So they could have walked in your front door and drunk themselves silly," he said. "But instead they do this."

  He reached down and picked up a shattered tumbler. The scrap was made of plastic derived from petroleum, formed in turn by the bodies of Terran animals hundreds of millions of years in the past.

  "Just for kicks," Petersen said. "Just to keep themselves entertained."

  17

  May 18, 382 AS. 1109 hours.

  "When we get onto the honeysuckle, sir," said Leaf, "I'm gonna be holding you from b
ehind. Okay? Like this."

  Wilding's rifle was three inches shorter without the muzzle brake. He leaned against the "crutch" with an insouciant grin nonetheless. He made no comment as the motorman stepped around him to grip his left wrist and the tunic over his right shoulder.

  Leaf felt Wilding shiver. The officer's wrist was cold and clammy. That was okay, not great but okay. There'd been spells of chills before and Wilding still seemed to be—

  Hell, within parameters. Like a drive motor. Nobody expected perfect; just functional, and they were all functional, more or less.

  "Right," said Ensign Brainard. "I'll take the flare."

  Caffey uncapped the short cylinder instead of handing it to Brainard immediately. He looked at a patch of sky beyond the ensign's right ear and said in a mild voice, "You've got a lot of experience with these, then, sir?"

  Brainard chopped out a laugh. "Not as much as you do, Fish," he said. "Sorry."

  He surveyed his crew. Leaf straightened instinctively as he met the CO's eyes. Brainard looked back at the torpedoman and said, "Whenever you're ready."

  Caffey switched the cap to the back end of the flare, where its firing pin touched the recessed primer. He aimed the tube in his left hand, then rapped the cap sharply. The charge blew the three packets out in a flat arc toward where the bridge of honeysuckle touched the hovercraft's deck.

  The magnesium filler ignited while the packets were still in the air. The wavering glare was bright even against the white shimmer of daylight on Venus.

  "What do we do if it don't catch the first—" began Wheelwright.

  Orange flame overwhelmed the flare's white intensity. The brown, twisted vines blazed up with a roar and a propagation rate just short of that of diesel fuel. The fire's violence threw bits of stem and leaves into the air. The miniature brands were consumed to black ash before they reached the top of their curves.