by David Drake
The whole business was unexpectedly quiet. An occasional splutter from the destroyed fan motors—insulation must still be burning—and the soft woo-woo-woo of the blades of the right rear unit were the only sounds besides Hogg's mumbled curses. A seadragon shrieked querulously in the distance.
Half of the surface below glittered in the sunlight—standing water in which reeds grew, not grass on dry land. In the flat angle of the bow camera, Diamond Cay would have looked much more dangerously solid.
Adele smiled a little more broadly than she usually did. She would still rather be viewing this as an image; ideally from a considerable distance away.
"Adele!" said Daniel. His back was toward her, but she had no difficulty understanding him. "When I tell you to, jump!"
"But—" Adele said. Her instinct was to stay with the hard-shelled vehicle, but that meant she would be slammed into that hard shell when it hit the ground. Whereas the surface—
"Jump!"
As Daniel shouted, he lifted himself on his hands, threw his legs forward over the side of the aircar, and flung himself clear. Adele could appreciate the grace of the movement, but it would have been a joke to imagine she could duplicate it. She tried to roll herself out, hoping to belly flop in the water.
The right side of the car began lifting again as soon as Daniel's weight no longer forced it down. The toe of Adele's left boot caught the edge and threw her into a flailing somersault.
Her right hand clamped over the data unit, though the press/seal pocket flap should hold it; she thrust her left arm out with the fingers spread. It made as much sense as anything else she could do. This wasn't the sort of thing librarians trained for.
Adele was upside down when the aircar slapped the wet ground like a huge fish sounding after a leap. Water, reeds, and viscous mud billowed up around it.
Things flew out. One of them was Tovera.
Adele hit in a sitting position with her legs splayed. The shock knocked all the breath out of her; her vision blurred. She bounced forward, limp as a rag doll.
She hit again. The turgid wave from the aircar's first impact picked her up and threw her a third time. She saw a bright light and didn't move for a time.
"Adele?" someone called from a distance. "Adele, can you hear me?"
Her vision cleared. She was lying on her back in water. Why am I floating?
She opened her mouth to answer. Her tongue moved, but there was barely enough air in her lungs to wheeze. She flailed her arms and found mud just below the surface. Closing her eyes for an instant to focus, Adele lifted herself into a sitting position and opened them again.
Daniel stood fifty feet away in knee-deep vegetation. His utilities dripped brown-black mud, but he must have found a pond of cleaner water to wash his arms to the elbows.
"Adele!" he repeated and began stumbling forward. He seemed to gain strength and equilibrium with each step.
Either a sitting posture or the effort of rising into it allowed Adele to breathe again. Her lungs felt fiery, but there was nothing sharp that might have meant broken ribs.
She could feel her personal data unit through the fabric, but she didn't take it out yet. The case was sealed against the environment, but that didn't mean Adele was going to bathe it in clinging mud to no purpose. There would be time enough to check it after she'd cleaned herself off to a degree.
Adele took a deep breath. She stuck her hands into the muck and tilted her body forward, then hunched to her feet. She had been fairly certain that her legs weren't strong enough yet to manage it alone.
Even so it was a near thing not to pitch onto her face again. Still, she was standing upright and fairly steady when Daniel—who had broken into a shambling trot—was able to put a hand on her shoulder.
"That was too close," he said. He smiled, but for an instant the expression reminded her of a skull. "Let's find the others. I don't see—no, there's Tovera."
Adele turned. The aircar was more than a hundred yards away, its crumpled bow sticking straight up. From the disturbed terrain between Adele and the vehicle, it had skipped twice more before it stopped. Mud-rimmed craters of brown water quivered in the green of marsh grass.
Tovera limped around the side of the wreck. Her arms were before her, each hand grasping the opposite wrist as though she were cradling something. Her face had no expression, but the skin was drawn over her cheekbones.
A seadragon called. The beasts always sounded angry. Of course it was likely enough that they were angry at the invasion of their territory.
Adele tapped her tunic pocket. The pistol was still where it belonged. She bent carefully—and even then paused to gasp with pain—and splashed her hands in the shallow water. She was likely to need the pistol before she needed the data unit.
"Tovera?" Daniel said. He tried to put the usual cheery lilt into his voice, but he wasn't completely successful. "Have you seen Hogg?"
"I'm here, Master Daniel," Hogg called as he too came out from behind the vehicle. His clothing was mud-splashed, but unlike the rest of them he hadn't been completely doused in muck. "Just seeing what I could salvage, which is bloody zip, it is. Every bloody thing went flying but me, and that was a near one too."
Adele looked at Hogg as he massaged a lump on his forehead. The blow hadn't broken the skin, but he would have a bruise there shortly.
"How did you manage to stay in the car?" she asked.
Adele's memories of the crash were like pictures painted on glass and then smashed. One vivid fragment was of seeing the aircar shortly before the second impact: upside down as it flipped endwise.
Hogg shrugged. "Don't rightly know, mistress," he said, and from the frown as he concentrated that was probably true. "Hung on like I'd hooked a pot of gold, I remember that. Braced a foot whichever direction it looked like we were going to hit the next time—which meant the frame of the windscreen the onct, and it held but I sure wouldn't have bet on that."
"Glad to have you back with us, Hogg," Daniel said, clasping hands with his servant. "Or I suppose I should put it the other way around, since it was me that left."
Hogg's grimace was probably meant for a smile. He said, "If she'd landed flat on her back, I'd a' been screwed and no mistake. But the way she was hopping around, I don't guess there was much risk of landing flat any which way?"
"No chance at all!" lied Daniel heartily. "Well, I guess we're none the worse for wear. The next thing to do is to decide how to get off this island."
"I've sprained my wrists," Tovera said simply. Everyone looked at her. "Or broken them, I suppose. I wasn't able to hold on."
She turned to Hogg and made a tiny bow.
"I'll splint them with a few stems and my shirttails," said Hogg gruffly. "I checked the panel in the cab where the first-aide kit was supposed to be, but I guess it's been empty since the gods know when."
He trotted toward the starbursts of feathery leaves growing nearer the crystal ruins. As he moved, he snicked open the blade of his knife.
Adele eyed the structure musingly. If the car had been flying toward rather than beside it when the motors failed, they would surely have been killed. Except perhaps Hogg, who had really remarkable reflexes in a crash. Though how could even he survive driving into a large mass of rock?
"I've got a satellite communicator in my attaché case," Tovera said. She must be in a great deal of pain—the redness and swelling in her thin wrists was startlingly obvious—but her voice was grimly whimsical as usual. "Which unlike the impellers will float. But where it may be floating is another matter."
They surveyed the undulating green landscape. It was a mile or more to open sea in the direction the aircar had been travelling when it hit the ground, but a rectangular case could have bounced in almost any direction. It depended on which corner touched down as the case spun.
"Oh, it won't be hard to find!" said Daniel; this time the enthusiasm sounded real. "We've got a fine vantage point on the tower of the castle there, fifty feet at least, wouldn't you say
? We'll find the case and call the Sissie to come pick us up. And then—"
His voice changed.
"—we'll deal with the person who sabotaged the car. Commander Gibbs, I shouldn't wonder."
"Yes," said Adele, suddenly brighter herself. "And learn why he did it, which is more important. Though perhaps not as satisfying."
She looked at the castle. The head of a seadragon lifted from the top of the tower and stretched toward Hogg. The creature shrieked like a stone-saw. It was by far the largest they had seen on the island, easily the thirty feet long which Adele's records gave as the maximum length.
Nearby was a puddle which was at least translucent if not clear. Adele stepped to it and rinsed her hands again.
Then she took the pistol from her tunic pocket.
CHAPTER 14: Diamond Cay, Zenobia
"Look at me, snake!" Tovera shouted from midway between the wreck and the base of the crystal tower. "I'm going to steal your eggs and eat them in front of you!"
Adele smiled minusculy. She had told her servant to shout to call attention to herself. It didn't matter what the words were or even if they were words. It didn't surprise her in the least that Tovera was acting as though the seadragon could understand the threats, however.
"Are we ready, then?" said Daniel. They had circled to approach the tower from the opposite side. He spoke quietly so as not to call the dragon's attention away from Tovera's fine performance, but his smile seemed satisfied and genuine.
He's really looking forward to this, Adele thought. Of course, he grew up fishing in the ocean—and Hogg was teaching him.
Adele wasn't looking forward to the business, though she wasn't really afraid. If things went wrong she would probably be killed, but she thought Daniel and Hogg would be able to escape. So long as she wasn't endangering others, the risks didn't greatly concern her.
"Ma'am?" Hogg said. He reached into his left pocket and lifted his pistol partly into sight. "Are you sure you wouldn't like mine?"
Hogg wore the steel-mesh mittens which he needed to handle his length of fishing line weighted on either end with a deep-sea sinker. The beryllium monocrystal was thin and flexible, but you could lift an aircar with it—if you attached the line to a metal part. It would cut plastic—or flesh—like a knife.
"Yes," said Adele. "I'm sure."
Though compact, Hogg's pistol was about twice the size of her own and threw osmium slugs instead of Adele's light ceramic pellets. It was a better choice if you were trying to knock the target down, but this seadragon was much too big for that to be possible.
If Hogg had carried a service pistol, Adele might indeed have borrowed it. The combination of high velocity and heavy slug would shatter the creature's skull; after that they could simply wait for the beast to die. Neither of the available pistols—nor Tovera's, which was much like Adele's—were sufficiently powerful, however. Therefore, she had suggested a different plan . . . .
"I'll feed your eggs to pigs, snake!" Tovera shouted. She had made a flag by tying her tunic to a sturdy reed. She managed to waggle it in the air by clamping her forearms together with the staff between them. "You'll have no offspring ever!"
The seadragon screamed at her. Its nest must be in one of the upper rooms, but it used the top of the tower as a vantage point. So long as Tovera called and capered, the beast was likely to remain where it could see her.
"Let me get half a circuit ahead," Adele said quietly. She stepped through the entrance and started up.
As Hogg had noted before the crash, a helical ramp six feet wide served the tower instead of a staircase. There was no railing nor sign of where one might have been. The central well was more than ten feet in diameter.
The ramp circled clockwise instead of being counterclockwise like a ship's companionways. That didn't matter in the present circumstances, but it felt subtly wrong.
The seadragon called again. There was a hole in the roof at the ramp's upper end. If there had ever been a door or other cover, it had vanished in the millennia since the tower was abandoned.
Hogg led Daniel into the tower, having scrupulously waited till Adele was opposite the entrance and one level higher. The fifty-foot height was divided into eight levels, so the rooms—though spacious—were far too low-ceilinged for a human to find them comfortable. The entrances were arcs almost ten feet broad at the base. As with the roof opening, there were no doors.
Light wicked through the tower's walls and flooded its interior, but the refractions and reflections of the crystal created shapes and emptinesses. Their movements kept Adele on edge; but not, she judged, significantly more on edge than she would otherwise have been when approaching a 30-foot reptile with a pocket pistol.
Adele was wearing RCN boots. They were thin enough to wear inside a vacuum suit, but their soft soles gripped even on the oily deck plates of a starship. That was perfect for the pebbled, gently rising surface of the ramp. It circled four times from the ground-level entrance to the roof.
On her second circuit, she reached the point where the building had been breached; had been melted away, if Daniel was correct. The room with no outer wall was brighter. By contrast, Adele could see that the light passing through the crystal had a bluish cast.
She continued at a steady pace. She wasn't looking directly at the roof opening: the bright light might blur her vision when the seadragon started down. Its body would curtain the hole. When the beast moved above on the roof, she saw it as shadows at the corners of her eyes.
The floor of the tower was covered with what Adele took for broken pottery when she first risked a glance downward. No, crab shells. She had assumed that the seadragon had chosen the tower simply as a safe place in which to lay its eggs, but the quantity of debris suggested that this was a permanent lair. Its stench was noticeably different from the vegetable miasma rising with every step in the muck of the marshes.
Perhaps they—she and Daniel—could collaborate on a scientific paper on the life cycle of the Zenobian seadragon. After the two of them retired. If they lived to retire. And of course assuming that the seadragons were native to Zenobia, though that could be hedged by modifying the title to, "The Colony of Seadragons Found on Zenobia."
The whimsy made Adele smile. Anyway the corners of her lips twitched upward.
She paused, half a circuit short of the tower's roof. Hogg with Daniel behind him were another half circuit below her. They had reached the entrance to the seventh level. Hogg was spinning a yard of his line out in the tower's well with his right hand while his left held the remainder in loose loops.
Daniel was watched her. Adele nodded, then shaded her eyes with her right hand as she looked up at the opening. Hogg whistled, a harsh trill that echoed in the crystal cylinder.
There was a clacking and scrabbling from the roof. The seadragon, its paddle feet spread to either side of the opening, thrust its head into the interior of the tower.
Adele's pistol snapped; the dragon's bulging right eye burst into silvery droplets. Snapped again and the left eye, the instant before an amber lantern, also splashed into darkness.
The weight of the dragon's shriek made Adele flinch backward. The creature lunged toward her. Its jaws were open but the small forelegs were tight against its chest. Its teeth were blunt cones that could crush a human skull as easily as they did crab shells.
Hogg's line looped about the seadragon's neck. The creature took another sliding, hunching step. Hogg drew back with the full strength of his upper body; he'd looped the monofilament around his right glove and gripped the heavy bronze sinker at his end with his left. Daniel had an arm around Hogg's waist and the other arm reaching through the doorway to lock on the wall of the room beside them.
The seadragon surged forward. Not even those two strong men could have overcome the infuriated creature's mass, but they pulled its blind head toward them across the tower.
The dragon took another step and slipped off the ramp. It screamed like a siren as it plunged toward the crab shel
ls forty feet below.
Hogg bellowed in agony. The dragon's cry ended in a hiss and a gout of blood that spattered the roof: Hogg hadn't been able to release the looped line, but it had decapitated the seadragon before the creature's weight pulled both men down with it.
The seadragon smashed to the floor. The body flopped and flailed for nearly a minute, and for longer yet occasional twitches dimpled the ton of flesh.
Adele knelt, waving her pistol gently to cool the barrel before she put it away. The seadragon's jaws clopped shut and opened in tetanic convulsions.
Adele didn't let herself blink. If her eyes closed even for an instant, she would see that great head stretching forward to crush the fine, organized brain of Adele Mundy.
* * *
Daniel didn't think the seadragon had reached Adele, but the motionless silence in which she knelt on the ramp made him worry as he trotted up to her. Had the tail slapped her as the creature went over the side? He wouldn't have noticed with all the other things that were going on at the time.
"Perfect marksmanship, Adele," he said cheerfully. "As expected, of course. I regret the danger to you, but you were right that there was no better way."
Adele put her pistol away and rose. "I wasn't in danger so long as it was you and Hogg with the line," she said. She sounded like her usual imperturbable self, but Daniel still had the feeling—it was no more than that—that something had disturbed her. She glanced past him and said, "Hogg? Are you all right?"
"I won't be shaking hands any time soon," Hogg muttered. "Nothing that won't heal, but it hurts like bloody blue blazes right now."
Daniel looked over his shoulder. He'd felt as though the creature's weight was going to pinch off his right arm against the doorjamb he'd hooked it around. Hogg had shouted at the same time, but that had seemed a natural reaction to his effort in holding on to the line. In his concern for Adele, Daniel hadn't realized that Hogg was injured.
