All other activities centered about the lock of the larger ship. Parahuans manipulating packaged and crated items were moving into it from the sea in escorted groups, emerging again to jet off for more. Like the guards they carried guide lights fastened to their heads.
Nile glanced around as Spiff came sliding down out of the root tangles above. The otters had returned to the surface to saturate themselves with oxygen before the action began. Spiff checked beside her, peering out through the roots at the ships, then tilted his head at her inquiringly. His depth-dark vision wasn’t equal to hers but good enough for practical work. Nile switched on her rig speaker. “Dan?”
“I read you.”
“Spiff’s back and ready to go.”
“My group’s also on hand,” Parrol’s voice told her. “We’ll start the diversionary action. Sixty seconds, or any time thereafter—”
Nile’s muscles tightened. She gave Spiff a nod, watched him start off among the roots. Resting the barrel of the UW rifle on the root section before her, she glanced back and forth about the area below. Her position placed her midway between the two ship locks; Spiff was shifting to the right, to a point above the lock of the cargo carrier, his first target. Where Parrol and the other three otters were at the moment she didn’t know.
A group of Oganoon approached the cargo lock again, guiding a burdened transport carrier. As they moved into the lighted area, the one in the lead leaped sideways and rolled over in the water, thrashing violently. The next in line drifted limply upwards, long legs dangling. The rippling sound of Parrol’s UW reached Nile’s audio pickup a moment later.
There was abrupt milling confusion around and within the lock. The rest of the transport crew was struggling to get inside past the guards. Thumping noises indicated that a number of Parahuan weapons had gone off. A medley of watery voice sounds filled the pickup. Then one of the little boats was suddenly in purposeful motion, darting at a slant up from the ships towards the root floor of the island. The other followed.
“Boats have a fix on you and are coming, Dan!”
“I’m retreating.”
The boats reached the roots, edged in among them. The patrol above the smaller ship had dispersed, was now regrouping. Somebody down there evidently was issuing orders. Nile waited, heart hammering. Parrol’s rifle snarled, drew a heavier response, snarled again. Among the roots he had a vast advantage in mobility over the boats. A swarm of armed Parahuans jetted out from the smaller ship’s lock. One of them shifted aside, beckoned imperiously to the patrol above. They fell in line and the whole group moved quickly up to the roots. Their commanding officer dropped back into the lock, stood gazing after them.
“The infantry’s getting into the act,” Nile reported.
“Leaving the ships clear?”
“Clear enough.”
The transport crew had vanished inside the carrier. Its two guards floated in the lock, shifting their weapons about. The pair on duty in the other lock must still be there, but at the moment only the officer was in sight. Nile studied him. Small size, slight build—a Palach. He might be in charge of the local operation . . . Parrol’s voice said, “I’ve given the otters the go ahead. They’re hitting the infantry. Move any time!”
Nile didn’t answer. She slid the rifle barrel forward, sighted on one of the carrier guards, locked down the trigger, swung to the second guard as the fist one began a back somersault. In the same instant she saw Spiff, half the distance to the carrier already behind him, doubling and thrusting as he drove down in a hunting otter’s awesomely accelerating sprint. He’d picked up his cue.
Now the Palach at the smaller ship floated in the rifle’s sights, unaware of events at the carrier. Nile held fire, tingling with impatience. The two guards there hadn’t showed again; she wanted them out of the way before Spiff arrived. The Palach glanced around, started back into the lock. She picked him off with a squeeze of her finger—and something dark curved down over the hull of the ship, flicked past the twisting body and disappeared in the lock.
Nile swallowed hard, slipped forward and down out of the cover of the roots. There were thumping sounds in the pickup; she couldn’t tell whether some of them came now from the ship. Her mind was counting off seconds. Parrol’s voice said something, and a moment later she realized she hadn’t understood him at all. She hung in the water, eyes fixed on the lock entrance. Spiff might have decided his second implosion bomb would produce a better effect if carried on into the spaceship’s guts—
A Parahuan tumbled out of the lock. Nile’s hand jerked on the rifle, but she didn’t fire. That Parahuan was dead! Another one . . .
A weaving streak emerged from the lock, rocked the turning bodies in its passage, seemed in the same instant a hundred feet away in the water, two hundred—
Nile said shakily, “Bombs set, Dan! Jet off!”
She swung about, thumbed the rig’s control grip, held it down, became a glassy phantom rushing through the dimness in Spiff’s wake.
Lunatic beast—
Presently the sea made two vast slapping sounds behind them.
There was light at the surface now. Sun dazzle shifted on the lifting waves between the weed beds. The front of the floatwood island loomed a quarter of a mile to the north. Flocks of kesters circled and dipped above it, frightened into the upper air by the implosions which had tom out a central chunk of the lagoon floor.
“Can you see me?” Parrol’s voice asked.
“Negative, Dan!” Nile had shoved the rig goggles up on her head. Air sounds rolled and roared about her. “Too much weed drift! I can’t get far enough away from it for a clear look around.”
“Same difficulty here. We can’t be too far apart.”
“Nobody seems to be trailing us,” Nile said. “Let’s keep moving south and clear this jungle before we try to get together.”
Parrol agreed and she submerged again. Spiff and Sweeting were around, though not in view at the moment. The wild otters had stayed with Parrol. There was no real reason to expect pursuit; the little gunboats might have been able to keep up with them, but the probability was that they’d been knocked out among the roots by the bombs. She went low to get under the weed tangles, gave the otter caller a twist, glanced at her rig compass and started south. Parrol had a fix on the aircar. She didn’t; but he’d said it lay almost due south of them now.
Sweeting and Spiff showed up half a minute later, assumed positions to her right and left . . . Then there was a sound in the sea, a vague dim rumbling.
“You getting that, Nile?”
“Yes . . . Engine vibrations?”
“Should be something of that order. But it isn’t exactly like anything I’ve ever heard. Any impression of direction?”
“No.” She was watching the otters. Their heads were turning about in quick darting motions. “Sweeting and Spiff can’t tell where it’s coming from either . . .” She added, “It seems to be fading at the moment.”
“Fading here, too,” Parrol said. “Let’s keep moving.”
They maintained silence for a minute or two. The matted canopy of weeds still hung overhead. The strange sound became almost inaudible, then slowly swelled, grew stronger than before. There was a sensation as if the whole sea were shuddering faintly and steadily about her. She thought of the great spaceship which had been stationed in the depths below the floatwood drift these months. If they were warming up its drives, it might account for such a sound.
“Nile,” Parrol’s voice said.
“Yes?”
“Proceed with some caution! Our wild friends just showed up again. They indicate they have something significant to report. I’m shifting to the surface with them to hear what it is.”
“All right,” said Nile. “We’ll stay awake.”
She moved on, holding rig speed down to her companions’ best traveling rate. The dim sea thunder about them didn’t seem to change. She was about to address Parrol when his voice came again.
“Got the rep
ort,” he said. “There’s a sizable submersible moving about the area. Evidently it is not the source of the racket we’re hearing. It’s not nearly large enough for that. The otters have seen it three times—twice in deeper water, the third time not far from the surface. It was headed in a different direction each time. It may not be interested in us, but I get the impression it’s quartering this section. That seems too much of a coincidence.”
Nile silently agreed. She said, “Their detectors are much more likely to pick up your car than us.”
“Exactly.”
“What do we do, Dan?”
“Try to get to the car before the sub does. You hold the line south, keep near cover if you can. Apparently I’m somewhere ahead of you and, at the moment, closer to the sub. The otters are out looking for it again. If we spot it on the way to the car, I’ll tag it.”
“Tag it?”
“With bomb number three,” Parrol said. “Had a feeling it might be useful before we were through . . .” Nile gave Spiff and Sweeting the alert sign, indicating the area before them. They pulled farther away on either side, shifted to points some thirty feet ahead of her. Trailing weed curtains began limiting visibility and the overhead blanket looked as dense as ever. The rumbling seemed louder again, a growing irritation to tight nerves . . . Then soggy tendrils of vegetation suddenly were all about. Nile checked rig speed, cursing silently, pulled and thrust through the thicket with hands and feet. And stopped as she met Sweeting coming back.
Something ahead . . . She followed the otter down through the thicket to the edge of open water. Other drift thickets in the middle distance. Sweeting’s nose pointed. Nile watched. For an instant then, she saw the long shadow outline of a submersible glide past below. Her breath caught. She cut in the rig, came spurting out of the growth, drove after the ship—
“Dan!”
“Yes?”
“If you see that sub, don’t try to tag it!”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s ours, idiot! I was looking down on it just now. It’s a Narcotics Control boat! And at a guess the reason it’s been beating around here is that it has its detectors locked on the Parahuan command ship—”
The receiver made a muffled sound of surprise. Then, quickly: “It’s probably not alone!”
“Probably not. How far do you register from your car?”
“Nine hundred yards,” Parrol’s voice said. “By the time we get together and make it there, we might—”
“We might be in the middle of a hot operation!”
“Yes. Let’s get back upstairs and see what we can see.”
Nile jetted up through the water, trailed by darting otter shapes, broke surface in a surging tangle of drift growth, began splashing and crawling out of the mess. Morning sun blazed through wind-whipped reeds about and above her.
“Nile,” snapped the intercom, “their ship’s here!”
“Their ship?”
“It’s got to be the Parahuan. Something beneath me—lifting! Looks like the bottom of the ocean coming up. Keep out of the way—that thing is big! I’m scrambling at speed.”
The intercom went silent. Nile stumbled across a pocket of water, lunged through a last tangle of rubbery brown growth, found open sea before her. The drift was rising sluggishly on a great swell. She shoved the goggles up on her head. Something shrieked briefly above. An aircar swept past, was racing back into the sky. Higher up, specks glinted momentarily, circling in the sun. A chain of patrol cars, lifting towards space, cutting through the aliens’ communication blocks—
The swell had surged past; the weed bed was dropping towards its trough, shut off by a sloping wall of water to the south. Nile knifed into the sea, cut in the rig, swept upwards, reached and rode the shifting front of the wave. View unobstructed—
“Sleds coming, Dan! Three of them.”
His voice said something she didn’t catch. Off to the right, less than half a mile away, the black hull of the Parahuan command ship lifted glistening from the sea. Rounded back of a giant sea beast.
Nile tried to speak again and couldn’t. Wind roar and sea thunder rolled about her. Out of the west, knifing lightly through the waves like creatures of air, the three sleds came racing in line on their cannon drives. On the foredeck of the one in the lead, the massive ugly snouts of spaceguns swiveled towards the Parahuan ship—already a third clear of the water and rising steadily. Pale beams winked into existence between the sled’s guns and the ship, changed to spouts of smashing green fire where they touched the dark hull. The following sleds swung left, curving in; there were spaceguns there, too, and the guns were in action. About the spaceship the ocean exploded in steam. Green fire glared through it. A ragged, continuous thundering rolled over Nile. The ship kept lifting. The sleds’ beams clung. There was no return fire. Perhaps the first lash of the beams had sealed the ship’s gunports. It surged heavily clear of the sea, fled straight up into the sky with an enormous howling, steam and water cascading back from it. The beams lifted with it, then winked out in turn, ceasing their thunder.
Nile’s ears still rang with the din. Lying back in the water, she watched the ship dwindle in a brilliant blue sky.
Run, Palachs, run! But see, it’s too late!
Two thin fire lines converged in the blue on the shrinking dot of the Parahuan ship. Then a new sun blazed in white fury where the dot had been. The fire lines curved away, vanished.
Federation warships had come hunting out of space . . .
She swung about in the water, saw a section of a broken floatwood bough twenty feet away, caught it and clambered aboard. A wave lifted the bough as she came to her feet, sent it rushing south. Nile rode it, balanced against a spur, gaze sweeping the sea . . . a world of brilliance, of dazzling flashes, of racing wind and tumbling whitecaps. Laughter began to surge in her, a bubbling release. One of the great sleds knifed past, not a hundred yards away, rushing on humming drives towards the island. A formation of CA patrol cars swept above it, ports open. Jet chutists would spill from the ports in minutes to start cleaning the abandoned children of Porad Anz from the floatwood.
Details might vary considerably. But as morning rolled around the world, this was the scene that was being repeated now wherever floatwood drifts rode the ocean currents. The human demon was awake and snarling on Nandy-Cline . . .
“Nile—”
“Dan! Where are you?”
“On the surface. Just spotted you. Look southwest. The aircar’s registering. Dr. Cay’s all right . . .”
Flick of guilt—I forgot all about Ticos! Her eyes searched, halted on a swell. There he was.
She flung up an arm and waved, saw Parrol return the salute. Then she cut in the rig, dived from the floatwood, went down and flashed through the quivering crystal halls of the upper sea to meet him.
X
“You are not,” said the blonde emphatically, “Dr. Ticos Cay. You are not Dr. Nile Etland. There are no great white decayed-looking monsters chasing you through a forest!”
Rion Gilennic blinked at her. She was an attractive young creature in her silver-blue uniform; but she seemed badly worried.
“No,” he told her reassuringly. “Of course not.”
The blonde brightened. “That’s better! Now who are you? I’ll tell you who you are. You’re Federation Council Deputy Rion Gilennic.”
“Quite right,” Gilennic agreed.
“And where are you?”
He glanced about. “In the transmitter room.”
“Anybody can see that. Where’s this transmitter room?”
“On the flagship. Section Admiral Tatlaw’s flagship. Oh, don’t worry! When I’m myself, I remember everything. It’s just that I seem to slide off now and then into being one of the other two.”
“You told us,” the blonde said reproachfully, “that you’d absorbed recall transcriber digests like that before!”
“So I have. I realize now they were relatively minor digests. Small doses.”
> She shook her head. “This was no small dose! A double dose, for one thing. A twenty-six minute bit, and a two minute bit. Both loaded with emotion peaks. Then there was a sex crossover on the two minute bit. That’s confusing in itself. I think you’ve been rather lucky, Deputy! Next time you try out an unfamiliar psych machine, at least give the operators straight information. On a rush job like this we had to take some things for granted. You could have stayed mixed up for weeks!”
“My apologies,” said Gilennic. Then he made a startled exclamation.
“Now what?” the blonde asked anxiously.
“What time is it?”
She checked her watch. “Ship or standard?”
“Standard.”
She told him. Gilennic said, “That leaves me something like ten minutes to get straightened out before Councilman Mavig contacts me.
“I can give you a shot that will straighten you out in thirty seconds,” the blonde offered.
“Then I won’t remember the digests.”
“No, not entirely. But you should still have the general idea.”
Gilennic shook his head. “That’s not good enough! I need all the details for the conference.”
“Well, I understand the councilman’s absorbed the digests, too. He may not be in any better shape.”
“That’ll be the day!” said Gilennic sourly. “Nothing shakes the councilman.”
She reflected, said, “You’ll be all right, I think. You’ve been coming out of it fast . . . Those two subjects had some remarkable experiences, didn’t they?”
“Yes, remarkable. Where are they at present?”
She looked concerned again. “Don’t you remember? They left ship almost an hour ago. On your order. Dr. Etland wanted to get Dr. Cay back to the planet and into a hospital.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 195