With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  And no reference to Cinnabar involved Daniel’s detachment. He and his companions, Adele included, had dropped out of existence so far as anyone else on this planet was concerned.

  The captives were all freed. The sailors reboarded the Ahura, grabbing the chromed rail at the deck’s edge and hauling themselves up with a quick kick against the side of the hull. Dasi got a hand from his mate Barnes, but only Hogg bothered to use the ladder attached to the vessel’s side.

  “Woetjans, toss them a carton of rations,” Daniel ordered. He faced the Kostroman thugs, his hands on his hips.

  “I’m leaving you a little food,” he said. “After that, you’ll have to make do with what you find. There may not be fresh water here, but there’s fruit and several of these plant species excrete salt to store water in their trunks.”

  He smiled brightly. “I hope you’re up on your native biota,” he said. “It’s a fascinating one.”

  “You can’t just leave us!” Ganser said.

  “Oh, I certainly could,” Daniel said. “But in fact I’ll let people back in Kostroma City know where you are in thirty days or so. Of course, I can’t guarantee that any of them will care.”

  Two sailors pitched a case of rations to the sand at Ganser’s feet. The wood broke and steel cans rolled out.

  Daniel turned. “Prepare to get under way!” he ordered. “I’ll take the helm.”

  * * *

  “The nozzle’s clear, sir!” called Dasi, leaning over the stern to peer into the crystalline water. With the bow well up on the shore, Daniel preferred to drag the Ahura backwards with the waterjet rather than try to tickle a sufficient charge into dry sand.

  “Everybody who doesn’t have a job move back to the stern!” Woetjans ordered, a sensible command and one Daniel should have thought to give himself. The ratings trotted aft, lowering the stern by their weight and so lightening the portion of the vessel that was aground.

  Daniel slowly advanced the throttle. He’d rotated the nozzle. The jet spewed forward, making the hull vibrate as though a hose were playing on the vessel’s underside. The Ahura slid back in a boil of water, scrunching for the first few feet of her motion and then floating free.

  Daniel chopped the throttle, looking over his shoulder to be sure that they were drifting clear and weren’t about to hit something. He couldn’t see behind because the crew was standing along the stern rail, but somebody would have shouted a warning if there was a problem.

  On shore, the Kostromans glared at the vessel with undisguised hate. Adele stood at the rear of the cockpit. Daniel caught her eye and said, “There’s plenty of natural food on the island, but I wonder whether that lot isn’t more likely to try cannibalism instead?”

  Adele sniffed. “For people of their sort,” she said, “I suppose cannibalism is natural.”

  The yacht had left the sand at a slight angle. She now floated parallel to the shore and was beginning to curve back on her remaining momentum. “Spread yourselves out,” Daniel ordered. “I’m going to bring her up on the skids.”

  He engaged the electrofoils while the ratings were still spreading forward. They moved with less immediacy than they’d run to the stern. The skids shuddered, but Daniel didn’t hear a grinding as he had the first time he’d deployed them. Scale and caked lubricant had loosened with use; the Ahura was in better condition than she’d been in some while, probably since she was laid up.

  Daniel Leary was in better shape than he’d been in a long while too. There was no worse way to treat tools or men than to leave them to rust.

  The yacht lifted. Daniel knew he could trust the mechanism now, so he brought her directly into dynamic balance on the skids instead of waiting until the Ahura was under way on the waterjet. They were alone in this sea. They didn’t need to adjust their conduct to the comfort of neighboring vessels.

  “Clear at the bow, sir!” Cafoldi said; rote, since there was no doubt of the fact. A good crew handled even the most cut-and-dried operations by the book, never cutting corners.

  Daniel twisted the joystick slightly to port, then increased the throttle pressure minusculely. The yacht wobbled ahead. The bow angled seaward. They slid past the end of the island.

  “Don’t forget to write!” Lamsoe called, waving to the stone-faced Kostromans twenty feet away on shore.

  Spray exploded toward the Ahura. A pair of hundred-foot tentacles arched from the interior of the lagoon. The flattened tips were each the size of Daniel’s torso and covered with fine cilia. They crossed the reef and seized the Ahura’s starboard skid.

  The yacht tilted with a wrenching clang. The electrofoils and the giant sweep’s own bioelectrical charge interfered with one another. A rainbow nimbus lit the air twenty feet from the vessel’s every surface.

  The tentacles retracted, pulling the Ahura onto her stern. Ratings shouted curses as they went overboard. The sweep was dragging the skids and hull through the coral heads. There were a few shots, their sound almost lost in the vessel’s grinding, snapping destruction.

  Somebody with a submachine gun punched three holes and a spiderweb of crazing in the windshield. The pellets missed Daniel’s head by less than he had time to worry about.

  He let go of the joystick because whatever input he had on the yacht’s controls just made things worse. Adele was spreadeagled against the cockpit’s port bulkhead, gripping two handholds.

  The power board shorted in blue fire as salt water reached a conduit whose sheathing had been scraped away on the coral. An instant later a generator blew explosively; foul black smoke spewed up through hatches and the fresh cracks in the decking.

  Lamsoe had gone over the side at the first impact, but the automatic impeller was still on its mount. Daniel grabbed its twin spade grips. The deck was no longer down; it sloped at sixty degrees as the sweep’s powerful tentacles continued to contract. The creature was tipping the Ahura on her back, using the coral reef as a fulcrum.

  Daniel braced his feet against a stanchion and one of the cockpit handholds. He thumbed the plate trigger between the impeller’s grips.

  The gun recoiled violently but the jury-rigged mount held. The first projectiles raked water empty except for the surge and bubbles stirred by the sweep’s tentacles. Daniel shot the burst on, adjusting his aim by twisting his whole body and using the gun itself as a support.

  The projectiles’ kinetic energy blew the lagoon into an instant fog. He continued to walk the impacts toward the memory of his target: the point where the tentacles emerged together from the lagoon.

  The Ahura was nearly vertical. Men and debris floated about her in the churning sea. Daniel’s right leg twisted around the gun mount, but his left foot dangled in the air.

  Bright yellow blood geysered in the steam at Daniel’s point of aim. Chunks of flesh, some of them bigger than a man, spun in all directions. A tentacle writhed across the water like a beheaded snake, both ends free. The other tentacle contracted in its final convulsion as the impeller emptied its magazine.

  The Ahura tilted over on her back, falling toward the lagoon where bloody, boiling water subsided. The impeller slipped from its mount and tumbled on its own course, taking Daniel with it in the instant before he let go.

  He caught a glimpse of Adele in the air. Her face was set and disapproving. One of her hands gripped the computer sheathed along her right thigh; the other was in the left pocket of her tunic.

  “Cinnabar!” Daniel shouted as he hit the water.

  * * *

  Adele supposed she ought to be thankful that the water at the edge of the beach was shallow enough that she hadn’t drowned. She’d come down on her knees, though, and the shock of the water and then packed sand three feet below the surface had made her nauseated with pain.

  Even now, ten minutes after Cafoldi brought her onto dry ground in a packstrap carry, she walked stiff-legged. She’d be surprised if she didn’t have bruises to midway on both thighs and shins.

  But she’d found her personal data unit worked p
erfectly despite the ducking. It was at least an open question whether or not she’d prefer to have broken her neck if the alternative was to be stranded on an island without access to civilized knowledge.

  Now that Adele had the mental leisure to notice, she saw that the sailors were all at work. Apparently nobody’d been killed or even seriously injured. For the most part they’d rolled into the water before the yacht flipped in the monster’s final convulsion.

  Daniel stood in the shade of a tree with small leaves and ropy branches. From each tip hung a nut that grew to the size of a clenched fist. While Daniel talked to Woetjans he peeled the flexible shell of a nut with a small knife, popping bits of the white flesh into his mouth at intervals.

  He broke off and grinned broadly when he saw Adele approaching. “You ran your data link through its paces?” he called.

  “Yes, thank God,” she said. “It’s supposed to be sealed against worse than a bath in salt water, but until I tried it I wasn’t sure.”

  Daniel flicked off another piece of nut meat. He held it out to her between his thumb and the knife blade. She shook her head; she was still doubtful whether her modest breakfast of crackers and meat paste was going to stay down.

  “What I was more worried about than damage,” she went on, “was that I’d lose it and not be able to find it under water.”

  The Ahura had fallen entirely within the lagoon. The yacht’s stern lay on the reef so several feet of the inverted hull were above water. Sailors diving beside the wreck were coming up with stores and equipment.

  The water was a sickly green, a combination of colors leached from vegetation on the surrounding islands and the blood of the creature that had destroyed the yacht. Adele assumed the low, gray mound floating a hundred feet from the shore was the sweep’s corpse.

  “It’s huge,” she said, looking from the lagoon to Daniel. She couldn’t imagine how he’d been able to aim as the Ahura shuddered up on end. She’d barely retained her holds on the bulkhead.

  “Yes,” Daniel said with a smirk of fully justified pride. “It’s not a new species, I suppose, but it still should get my name into the records somewhere, don’t you think? Big game hunting if not zoology texts.”

  He laughed with the easy assurance Adele had come to associate with him. “It was too big to ever leave the lagoon. It certainly wouldn’t have had any competition for food inside the ring of the atoll, but I’ll be interested to learn just what that food could be.”

  Barnes sat on the vessel’s stern, holding tarpaulins and rope knotted into a pair of saddlebags. They hung to either side of the hull. Cafoldi, one of the divers, came up from the foul water with a shout and a submachine gun in his hand. He splashed on three limbs to the vessel and thrust the weapon into the bag on his side.

  Ganser and his Kostromans kept their distance, glowering at the Cinnabars. They weren’t precisely under guard, but any attempt to rush Daniel would have to get past Dasi holding an impeller by the barrel as a club and Hogg, who was trimming a point on a sapling he’d cut down with a knife much sturdier than the one in his master’s hand. As a spear it looked crude, but nobody who knew Hogg would doubt it was lethal.

  Lamsoe and Sun sat cross-legged on a mat of leaves cut from a parasol-shaped shrub. They were each stripping a submachine gun to its component parts. Adele obviously wasn’t alone in doubting that any locally manufactured electronics, electromotive weapons included, could survive immersion in salt water.

  She wasn’t sure what the sailors could do to refurbish the guns, however. Flushing in fresh water, sun-drying and prayer, she supposed, but she recalled Daniel’s question whether there was any fresh water on the island.

  “Do you want me to call Kostroma City for rescue?” Adele asked quietly.

  Daniel looked at her in surprise. “Good heavens, no,” he said. “That’d be the same as handing ourselves over to the Alliance.”

  His concern broke in a smile. “We’ve invested quite a lot in avoiding that already. I don’t think we need to give up just yet.”

  “I, ah …” Adele said. She looked at the web of jungle, then behind her to the open sea. You could sail a thousand miles across that ocean without finding land more promising than this on which she stood.

  She knew that. She’d just come that thousand miles and more.

  “You think we can live here indefinitely?” she said. “Well, I suppose you’re the expert….”

  Daniel laughed aloud. “Now, did I say that I’d rather leave us here forever to rot than wait in a camp on Pleasaunce for an eventual prisoner exchange?” he said. “This is a delay, Adele. But we needed to lie low for a time anyway so we’re not really losing anything.”

  He nodded toward the Ahura’s stern. Barnes was standing, holding one end of a line over which he’d strung the bags of salvage. A sailor stood in mud to her ankles pulling the bags to the shore. Two others waited nearby to empty the gear; the divers held on to the yacht and chatted while they waited for the bags to return.

  “I don’t think we’ll be able to use the hull,” Daniel said. “It’s a one-piece casting and very tough, but when the integrity’s breached the core of the sandwich starts to fray. Since we can’t reheat the edges to three thousand degrees Kelvin, we’re better off using wood. I’m pretty sure we can get the waterjet back in operation, though, and at least one of the solar sails.”

  “I see,” Adele said, not that she did. She stared at the jungle, visualizing a boat made of that.

  “You can access a forestry database from here, can’t you?” Daniel said. “I’ve only got the once-over-lightly from the Aglaia’s library. We don’t want to learn that we’re building the hull of a tree whose sap makes people turn blue and die in a week.”

  He laughed. In the lagoon the divers were back at work, bringing up objects so disguised by clinging mud that Adele couldn’t guess their identity. The atoll’s outer face was clean sand and clear water, but the lagoon-side shores were gray-black muck that the ocean currents didn’t reach to scour away.

  “I can access any electronic information that I could have found for you while we were in Kostroma City,” Adele said, feeling disassociated from the cheerful bustle about her. It was as though a thick glass wall encircled her, keeping her apart from her companions despite her presence in their midst. “I suppose there are botanical files as well as the zoological ones we’ve used in the past.”

  “You know?” Daniel said, looking out into the lagoon. He’d finished the nut; he tossed the rind into the undergrowth behind him to decay into nutrients like those that stained the still water. “If the Ahura hadn’t been an electrofoil, we’d never have learned about the sweep. They’re quite harmless to humans, you know. Though—”

  His grin.

  “—I wouldn’t care to have gone swimming with that one.”

  “Yes, that’s probably true,” Adele said.

  The contrast between her dour feelings of defeat and the cheerful optimism Daniel shared with his sailors suddenly amused her. She chuckled also. Daniel was genuinely glad to have observed a creature of previously unknown size. It had almost killed him and his companions; it had almost wrecked his plans to escape Kostroma—

  But “almost” was the key word with Daniel Leary. He didn’t worry about things that were past; it was at least an open question in Adele’s mind whether he worried about the future either. Though she wasn’t about to call him a simple man….

  Daniel and Woetjans were discussing food and water. Daniel nodded to the sailor’s queries and clipped another ripe nut as he listened.

  Adele walked past Lamsoe and Sun, stepping carefully so that the wind didn’t blow sand particles from her soles over the dismantled weapons. Hogg, cleaning sap from his knife with a fibrous leaf, nodded to her, then grimaced.

  Hogg had a bad bruise on the right side of his head. A film of ointment closed the scrapes and the cut above his temple, but Adele was afraid he needed better medical attention than was available here.

  S
he stepped between Hogg and Dasi, facing the group of former prisoners. They stopped their low-voiced conversations and looked at her with a mixture of emotions. A sort of bestial hunger was part of the brew she saw now in the thugs’ eyes.

  Adele smiled. It was her usual version, an expression nobody could mistake for good-humored.

  “You’ll have noticed that all the guns were soaked when the boat was wrecked,” Adele said. “You may believe that they won’t work until they’re properly cleaned, probably cleaned better than is possible here on this island.”

  “Mistress!” Dasi blurted in horror behind her. In the corner of her eye Adele saw Hogg move, putting a restraining hand on his companion.

  Adele drew her own pistol from her jacket pocket. She fired off-hand. A bell-shaped fruit exploded on a branch twenty feet in the air, spraying pulp and seeds down onto the Kostromans. Ganser shouted and covered his bald scalp with his hands.

  “My gun was made on Cinnabar,” she said. “It works quite well.”

  Adele slid the weapon back into her pocket. “And so do I,” she added over her shoulder as she returned to Daniel’s side.

  * * *

  Sunlight awakened Daniel. It filtered through the shelter of leaves and saplings his ratings must have built around him while he was asleep.

  “Why didn’t—” Daniel said as he sprang upright. Every muscle in his body, particularly the big ones in his thighs and shoulders, grabbed him simultaneously. It was like being attacked by a platoon of madmen with icepicks.

  “Mary Mother of God!” Daniel cried tightly. His mouth would have been content to scream instead.

  Overwhelming pain had made his eyes blink closed. Memory painted across the inside of his eyelids an image of himself forty feet in the air, wrapped around the shuddering gun mount.

  Daniel Leary had done amazing things yesterday, he’d tell the world he had, but exertion like that came with a price tag. He was paying it now.