“Because you and I are going to attack those orbital fortresses. This time, we’ll go in with all guns blazing.”
Rutherford’s frown deepened. “That little scrape was one thing. A full-on assault is another matter entirely. What makes you think they won’t hit us with all their firepower this time around?”
“It’s not a question of won’t,” Drake said. “It’s a question of can’t.”
Chapter Nine
The first torpedo boat missed Tolvern’s away pod with its guns. It was past them in a blink, tossing the pod in its superheated wake. A second boat came in, guns flaring. Most of the bullets zipped harmlessly past, but at least one slammed into them. It punctured the pod.
Something splattered Tolvern’s face. Brockett screamed. She wiped away the splatter, thinking it was liquefied science officer, but was relieved to find it was meat sauce. The bullet had hit a crate of food. Brockett was uninjured.
And if that crate had been ammunition, the whole pod would have gone kaboom. Lights out. End of mission.
As it was, they were still in space, and their air shrieked out through a hole the size of a half-crown. Nyb Pim had the presence of mind to shove a pulverized can of food at the hole. It made a final slurping sound as the vacuum outside grabbed the can and held it tight.
They were now spinning crazily, and Tolvern scrunched her eyes shut. Waiting. The torpedo boats would come by for another pass, this time at a slower speed. This time, the bullets would find them, find the ammo.
Nothing. Only the howling wind as they entered the atmosphere. Must be Vargus. The pirate captain must have followed the torpedo boats toward the planet, risking the fortress guns to chase them off. Slowly, the pod stabilized. It was still spinning, the planet swiping across the port window every few seconds and then disappearing. But more slowly now. The lurching in Tolvern’s stomach stopped.
“We are okay,” Carvalho said. He sounded like he was talking to himself, not the others. “A little hole—nothing terrible. The parachute is undamaged. It will deploy.”
“No, we’re not okay,” Brockett said, voice pinched. “It’s all wrong.”
Tolvern didn’t like his tone. “What makes you say that? How can you tell?”
“That bullet altered our trajectory.” Brockett said this with his eyes closed. He looked green from motion sickness. “The engine wash, too. Remember that? We’ve been thrown off course.”
“Surely, not much,” Tolvern said. “A few yards. Fifty feet, maybe?”
“Fifty feet up there. Fifty miles down below. Maybe five hundred. Maybe we’ll end up in the ocean.”
“You are not making any sense,” Carvalho protested.
“Explain it to them, Pilot,” Brockett told Nyb Pim.
“Carvalho, you understand the importance of calibrating a gun scope, do you not?” Nyb Pim asked.
“Of course, but—”
“Imagine that your scope is fractionally misaligned. At fifty yards, you miss by an inch or two. You still hit your target. At fifteen hundred yards, you miss by four feet. What if you had to fire your gun from a range of fifteen hundred miles? How far would you miss?”
Carvalho cursed in Ladino. Then, “Diablos, what do we do now? Where will we come down?”
“Not in the ocean,” Tolvern said. “You can put that fear to rest.”
“How can you be sure?” he asked. “The planet is eighty percent water.”
“Because we were launched almost at the center of the main continent, which is still an awfully big target,” she said. “The mountains are a bigger worry. We should come down soft enough, but that northern range is really rugged. We land on the wrong peak, and we’ll be stuck high and dry. Could be months before Drake is able to extract us.”
“It might be never,” Nyb Pim said. “Look.”
He pointed one of his long, bony fingers at the instrument panel above Tolvern’s head. She twisted to see. The panel was a black sheet of plastic. No data scroll, no flashing indicators. Nothing.
“Blast it,” she said. “It’s fried. Must have taken a second bullet.”
“What about the parachute?” Brockett asked. “Will it still deploy?”
That was a good question. It operated on a different system than the console, and she thought it had a mechanical backup which deployed automatically when a certain pressure threshold was reached, but gunfire might have torn it up, too.
Tolvern managed a grim smile. “If it doesn’t deploy, our landing site is the least of our concerns.”
It was getting warm in the pod. Vargus’s crew had welded on scraps of old tyrillium armor to take the friction of the atmosphere that would otherwise burn them to a cinder. That armor had probably absorbed fire and saved their lives. But it had taken damage and was failing to deflect all the heat. Tolvern’s molded seat was getting so hot it felt like she was sitting on a rapidly heating griddle.
Brockett stared out the porthole. “Any moment now.”
They hit clouds. Visibility was gone. What was the cloud level? Shouldn’t the parachute be out by now? Yet she was still floating in her seat. The wind kept shrieking around them.
A pop, a shudder. Then it was as if a rope yanked up on them from above. Tolvern’s seat seemed to shove her from below. The parachute had deployed.
“Dios mio,” Carvalho said. “I thought we were done for.”
Nyb Pim unhooked his harness. He made his way over to Tolvern, bent nearly double to keep from hitting his head on the human-size ceiling. They hit an air pocket, and he staggered into a stack of crates.
“What are you doing?” Tolvern asked as he reached over her shoulder.
“I am attempting to reset the console. If the parachute deployed electronically, it means the power systems are still active.”
The console beeped, which Tolvern took as a good sign. A moment later, a yellow light blinked, and instructions scrolled across the screen. Nyb Pim made a pleased-sounding hum deep in his throat. He returned to his seat and strapped himself in.
“Well done, Pilot,” she told him.
The others stared over her head, occasionally calling out the altitude as they came down. At two thousand feet, Tolvern checked her straps one last time and closed her eyes.
“A thousand feet,” Brockett said. “Five hundred. Here we go!”
Tolvern braced herself. They hit. The ground seemed to give way, before bouncing them up again. Trees? No, they’d started to settle again. The pod rolled onto its back, and black liquid sloshed up the porthole. Water.
“Everyone out!” she cried.
They unstrapped themselves and shoved boxes aside as they made for the exit. The exit was now above them, thank God, and not facing down into the water, but there was no guarantee it would stay that way. Tolvern slapped her hand on the pad, and the door slid open. Muggy, almost steam-hot air rushed into the pod. It smelled like rotting eggs and moldy vegetables.
Tolvern got her arms out and hoisted herself onto the surface of the pod. She blinked against the hot red sun shining overhead. The sky was orange and hazy.
They’d landed in a swamp on the edge of a small lake, in the midst of a carpet of spreading red lily pads, each big enough to hold a man. A forest of enormous, red, fern-like plants marched from the shore into the lake, with knobby roots lifting them above the water. The parachute had hit one of these fern trees, torn loose, and hung limply from its fronds.
Meanwhile, the bed of lily pads that had caught them was giving way, and the pod was slowly sinking. Water reached the open hatch as Tolvern reached down to hoist Brockett out. It poured over the edge and into the open interior.
She got Brockett out, and he slid down the side of the pod to one of the lily pads. It heaved up on the end as it took the man’s weight. Disturbed by the movement, water insects the size of Tolvern’s hand dove away with oar-like appendages. A water snake or large eel slithered past.
Nyb Pim got his long arms and his head and shoulders out, but the pod had begun to tilt as it
filled, and he nearly fell back. By the time she got him out, Carvalho was waist-deep in water inside, and the pod was sinking quickly.
He handed up a box, which she tossed down to Nyb Pim on his lily pad. The black water was already up to his shoulders.
“Get me out of here!”
“Guns!” she cried. “We need weapons.”
He ducked under and disappeared for a long moment. The pod was completely submerged now, and Tolvern felt like she was balancing on a sinking ship as water rose to her ankles. Brockett and Nyb Pim called to her, urging her to get Carvalho out.
He came up sputtering, holding two assault rifles, and swam clear just as the pod rolled. Tolvern pitched into the water. It was as warm as a bath and tasted of mud. She came up spitting, grabbed for Carvalho, and the two of them flailed toward the lily pads where the others dragged them out.
Some large creature roiled the water near where the pod had vanished. She remembered the crocodile-like creatures with the horny beaks that had attacked them last year in the highlands. The four of them stood still for a long moment, tense and waiting. Finally, the water calmed, except for a few bubbles from where the pod had disappeared. It had completely vanished in the ink-black water.
“What have we got?” she asked.
“Two rifles,” Carvalho said. “Forty rounds each.”
“And the crate?”
Brockett turned it over. “Zip packets of dried carrots.”
“Carrots?” Carvalho grumbled. “What are we, rabbits? There was good beef stew on that pod. I should have checked the bloody label.”
Forget carrots and stew. Their ability to purify water, start a fire, defend themselves, and communicate with the universe was all gone. Not to mention that they’d lost the thousands of doses of sugar antidote that had brought them to Hot Barsa in the first place.
“We can’t sit here feeling sorry for ourselves,” she said. “First thing is to get off the lake so we don’t get eaten by whatever is down there. We’ll figure it out once we get to the woods.”
“Bet the jungle is full of lurkers and pouncers,” Brockett said glumly.
Nevertheless, what was lurking beneath the water frightened her more than anything that might attack them in the jungle, so they set about stepping from one lily to the next on their way to the shore. It was only about twenty feet until the lilies gave way to sharp reeds.
“How deep is it from here?” Tolvern asked.
Nyb Pim stood on the last lily. He bent and thrust a forearm down. “A few feet, then it’s solid. We can walk from here.”
Not solid, exactly. More like thick, boot-sucking mud. Tolvern tried to balance the need not to lose her footwear with the desire to get out of the water and on shore as soon as possible. They were making a good deal of noise sloshing along, and she kept a wary eye behind her, waiting for a horny snout to break the surface.
The fern forest was thick with vines and interlocking branches, and they sloshed around the side of the small lake until they came upon a dead, rotting fern tree bent at a right angle over the water. It seemed like a good place to get out. She grabbed the trunk, hoisted herself up, and reached out her hands for the box. She secured it between two dead fronds so it wouldn’t fall, then helped up her companions, one after another. Soon, all four sat on the trunk, several feet above the water. High enough to stay out of reach of lunging crocodiles? She hoped so.
Nyb Pim reached for an adjacent fern and broke off two fronds, which he draped over them to block the sun. With no breeze and the air like steam, it didn’t help much.
Tolvern stared out at the water, now unbroken by a single ripple. They were only fifty feet from where the pod had sunk. Taking in the surrounding alien landscape, with a swampy, nearly impenetrable forest around this black, deadly lake, she felt nearly overwhelmed. What a desperate situation. They should have landed on a dry plain, fully stocked, not here.
She glanced at the others. Carvalho took off his shirt and spread it on the trunk in the sun. Too muggy; it would never dry. Nyb Pim sat with his knees pulled up against his chest, deep in thought. Brockett tried in vain to clean off his damp glasses. None of them let their feet dangle over the edge.
“We can’t sit here forever,” she said.
“And what do you suggest we do?” Carvalho asked.
“We need those supplies.”
“They are at the bottom of the lake, in case you did not notice.”
“Look,” she said, “the middle of the lake is clear of lilies. They only grow around the edges.”
“So?” Carvalho said.
“So, the whole thing is only a few hundred yards across. Why don’t they grow right into the center? Probably too deep there—that means it’s shallow where the lilies grow. The pod landed on the lilies. The shallow part.”
“She’s right,” Brockett said. “The water is so black, you can’t see a thing, but I bet the top of our pod is only a few feet down. Our supplies—all of them—are in waterproof containers.”
“We need to try,” Tolvern said.
Carvalho had looped his gun sling around a brown stump on the edge of the main trunk, and now unhooked it. “Go ahead, Brockett. Swim for it. I’ll keep you covered from right here.”
“Me?”
“I will go,” Nyb Pim said.
“Do you know something we don’t?” Carvalho asked, coming over to sit by the Hroom. “Like maybe the lake isn’t as dangerous as it looks?” He sounded hopeful.
“It is deadly,” Nyb Pim said. “In more ways than you’d expect.”
He reached and plucked something from Carvalho’s shoulder. It was a leech, about two inches long and the exact bronze color of the man’s skin. The Hroom put it on the trunk of the tree and smashed it with the palm of his hand. Blood and a yellow, pus-like substance squirted out.
“Rayos!” Carvalho said.
He stripped to his underwear and found three more leeches on his body. Tolvern had only been in the water seconds, but she found her own leech on the inside of her upper arm. It was pale pink, the color of her skin. When she plucked it off, she didn’t feel a thing, but it was engorged with her blood.
Brockett peered down at the thing as she went to smash it with the rifle butt. “Fascinating,” he said. “They match the color of your skin. Remarkable mimicry for a parasite.”
Carvalho blew air through puffed cheeks as Tolvern settled down, seemingly calmer. “You are right, Commander. We will go in the water. It’s the only way to get the hell away from this lake. But it shouldn’t be you, Pilot.”
“Why not?” Nyb Pim asked.
“You are our translator,” Carvalho said. “Our only hope is to find those rebel Hroom. Brockett knows this business with the antidote. We cannot lose him. And Tolvern is our commander.” He sighed. “That leaves me.”
He stood, still wearing only his underwear, and walked along the length of the trunk where it hung over the water, as if he meant to take a leap. If he jumped from the end, he’d be halfway to the disturbed lilies where the pod had gone down.
“Wait,” Tolvern said. When it came right down to it, Carvalho could be plenty brave, but it was too much for one person. “Come back here, it’s not going to work like that.”
He turned. “How do you mean?”
“It’s going to take all day to get our stuff out. One guy can’t do all that. We’ll take turns.”
“Someone still has to go first.”
“Right, but we’ll be civilized about it,” she said. “I’ll hold up fingers behind my back. One to four fingers. You can each guess. If nobody gets it, I’ll go myself.”
“Let the gods decide,” Nyb Pim said. “Yes, that is fair.”
But in the end, “the gods” chose Carvalho to go first anyway. He made his way back out to the end, grumbling that if he’d gone in when he’d first proposed, he’d be out of the water already.
“You see anything coming after me, you shoot it. And if something gets hold of me, and you can’t get a clean shot
, don’t let me suffer. Shoot me before it drags me down.”
“Not going to happen,” Tolvern said. She hefted one of the rifles. Nyb Pim had the other. “But keep it quiet. Don’t go splashing around.”
“What do you think I am doing here? Paddling around the lake collecting botanical samples for Brockett? Of course I will keep it quiet.”
Carvalho crawled the final length of the trunk. It bent toward the water near the end. When he could go no farther, he grabbed hold of it and lowered himself tentatively until his toes broke the surface of the lake. Tolvern half expected a monstrous snout to rise up, water streaming from its nostrils. But all was tranquil. Carvalho took a deep breath and dropped.
He came up quickly and swam in a rapid breaststroke towards the broken lily pads. When he reached the spot, he stopped and treaded water.
“I can feel it with my feet! It’s right below me, and not very far down, either.”
“Good!” Tolvern called back. “Now shut up and get to work.”
Carvalho kicked his feet up and dove down. He was under the water for several seconds before he popped up again. He turned around, reoriented himself, and dove again.
But this time, he didn’t come back up. Tolvern held her breath, her heart pounding. Several more seconds passed. It had been too long. Something had taken him. Good heavens, why had she sent him out? They knew something was in the water; she’d seen it moving. Why had she been so stupid?
Finally, his head broke the surface. He gasped for air. He was empty handed, but didn’t make another attempt, only swam quickly for the overhanging tree. When he reached it, Tolvern and Nyb Pim grabbed his outstretched arms and hauled him onto the trunk, where he lay gasping for air.
Tolvern and Nyb Pim plucked off the leeches from his body. There were at least a dozen.
“Well?” she demanded.
“I felt it all right. The opening. Right down against the mud where it hit after the pod rolled. Can’t get inside, though. Opening is too narrow with it half-buried.” Carvalho held his thumb and index finger about two inches apart. “This much is all you’ve got.”
Rebellion of Stars (Starship Blackbeard Book 4) Page 7