With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  “We thought you could use your beauty sleep, sir,” said Woetjans, seated with her back to the shelter’s end post. She stood easily and offered Daniel her hand.

  “I’m not proud,” he muttered. He took Woetjans’s callused grip as a brace to hold him as his legs levered him upright.

  After the first instant, it wasn’t too bad. The first instant felt like the madmen had exchanged their icepicks for flensing knives.

  He laughed at Woetjans’s concerned expression. “Remind me to get into shape before the next time I go out for trapeze,” he said. “I’ll be all right, I’m just stiff.”

  Very carefully Daniel stretched, locking his fingers behind his neck and arching his spine backward. He’d moved the detachment into a natural clearing formed by a protrusion of the igneous rock around which the island had grown. The ground cover was low-growing and soft. The hard rock wouldn’t support larger vegetation, and the canopies of surrounding trees shaded but didn’t cover the sky.

  “Ganser’s lot buggered off in the night,” Woetjans said. “I don’t guess that’s much loss. They took a case or two of rations, but we had all the guns under guard with us.”

  “I wonder where they think they’re going to go?” Daniel said with a frown. He didn’t understand the situation, so it worried him. The Kostroman thugs had scarcely seemed the sort who’d be ashamed to take charity from a Cinnabar contingent which was obviously more competent at living rough.

  “I told the crew to make sure they’re always two together, even if they’re just going around the next tree to take a leak,” Woetjans said. “If anybody runs into a problem with the wogs, then I guess we’ll finish things the way we could’ve done back on Kostroma.”

  Lamsoe and Sun, the detachment’s armorer and armorer’s mate by necessity, were in the clearing working on the guns. Daniel had seen enough of the pair to respect their competence but, like Adele, he very much doubted that the weapons could be safely reconditioned under the present circumstances.

  “Where’s Ms. Mundy?” he asked. He heard ratings calling from the forest, gathering food from the species he’d indicated before the sudden tropic nightfall of the previous day. They’d begun cutting wood besides. Rhythmic axe blows rang from deeper in the forest.

  Hogg lay on a leaf mat, beneath a shelter like the one that had covered Daniel. At intervals Sun leaned over and mopped Hogg’s face and mouth with a damp rag. Hogg was breathing hoarsely and, for the first time in Daniel’s recollection, looked his age.

  “She went back to the beach for a better line to the satellites she’s using,” Woetjans said, also a little grimmer for viewing Hogg. “There’s six ratings there on the salvage detail, so no wog’s going to catch her alone.”

  The big bosun’s mate shook her head. “Mind, I’d bet her against the whole lot of them. She surprised the living shit outa me, she did.”

  “Yeah,” said Daniel. “Me too.”

  He shrugged, loosening his muscles a little more. “I’m going to take her on a tour of the neighborhood,” he said. “She can get me details on the wildlife through her computer.”

  Daniel grinned and added, “And she can be my bodyguard, so don’t put on that sour expression, Woetjans. The rest of the detachment has its duties laid out, so I’m the party best spared for scouting.”

  Whistling and feeling better with every step—he still had a ways better to feel, he admitted—Daniel walked down the path to the beach. It was improved over the simple trackway they’d forced through the undergrowth the day before. The yacht hadn’t carried machetes or axes, but the ratings had improvised.

  Adele sat at the edge of the beach, her back to a tree with knobby joints in its trunk. Her legs splayed out before her instead of being crossed. As he’d expected, the personal data unit was on her lap and the wands in her hands. She didn’t notice Daniel’s arrival till Barnes shouted a greeting from the Ahura’s upturned hull.

  “I’m downloading everything I can find on Kostroman botany,” she said by way of greeting. Despite the brusque opening, she’d smiled to see him up and about. “The files are an awful tangle. Everything on this planet is an awful tangle.”

  “That’s why they need experts from Cinnabar,” Daniel said cheerfully. “Let’s take a walk and see if we can’t do some untangling.”

  Adele shut her computer down and transferred it to its sheath with a stringent caution that any spacer could recognize and approve. Only then did she rise, using Daniel’s offered arm as an anchor. It was like watching someone stand while wearing stilts. The two of them had stayed aboard the yacht until the instant it went over, so they’d had long dives into the water.

  Daniel gestured to the left, past the salvage crew and along the lagoon side of the island. Fresh water was going to be a major concern when they left the atoll’s fruit behind in their jury-rigged vessel, and barrel trees couldn’t set their free-standing roots in ocean currents.

  “A good thing we didn’t hit the land,” he said. He grinned. “Or the coral.”

  “When I got up this morning, I didn’t think I could hurt any more than I did,” Adele said as she fell clumsily into step with him. “My knees were the size of melons. By now some of the swelling’s gone down and I’m almost glad that I wasn’t killed.”

  Daniel blinked, then realized she was joking. He chuckled.

  He supposed she was joking.

  There was no path through the jungle anywhere on the island. Daniel would have been surprised to find it otherwise since large animals were unlikely to reach the atoll except if carried here by humans. It was fairly easy to move through the interior because the shaded undergrowth grew soft-stemmed and sickly, but to find the barrel trees they had to scout the margins.

  He took the lead as they entered a thicket. The shrubs had thin, ropy stems with an explosion of green and yellow leaves at the peak fifteen feet in the air. Despite Daniel’s weight, the plants resisted him like a human mob.

  “How is Hogg?” Adele asked quietly from behind him.

  “Not great,” Daniel admitted, as he forced his way through to a less obstructive stretch of vegetation. He was sweating and breathing hard as he spread the last of the ropy shrubs for his companion.

  “We can use these for fiber if we need to,” he said to Adele. “Though there was plenty of spare line aboard the Ahura. That’ll be simpler unless we can’t locate it now.”

  Tiny insects shimmered about them, tickling as they drank human body oils and sometimes drowned in the droplets they craved. A wedge of lagoon entered the island here. Stalked eyes peered from the water, then vanished in bubbles and swirls of mud.

  “They’ll do nicely to expand our diet,” Daniel said. “Crustaceans of some kind. There ought to be shellfish both here in the mud and on the ocean side.”

  He met Adele’s eyes. “I’m worried about Hogg,” he said. “He’s got a concussion and there’s not a damned thing we can do here except supportive treatment.”

  Adele gestured to her sheathed computer. “Any time you want …” she said.

  Daniel shook his head. “No,” he said. “I have responsibility for the whole detachment. Things happen in wartime.”

  Daniel took them inland to where they could step over the notch instead of trying to cross its original ten-foot width, even though that would have saved a hundred yards from their trek. He was sure that no major predator could have shared the lagoon with the giant sweep; but a day ago he’d have sworn that no sweep grew more than twenty feet in total length.

  It wasn’t as though they had a particular place to get to, after all. Daniel found two barrel trees on this side of the notch and saw another one across it. The squat trunk was hidden in the undergrowth but vast, billowing foliage marked the tree clearly.

  Whenever he had a question, Adele squatted and brought out her personal data unit. When she’d come as close as she could from the parameters he gave her, she handed the miniature computer to him to refine the data.

  The librarian’s face a
s she parted with the unit was like that of a mother letting a drunken stranger hold her baby. She didn’t protest, though, and only the perfect rigidity of her expression indicated the horror she must feel in her heart.

  By midday they were only a few hundred yards from the sandy beach where they’d started their trek, but Daniel was even more confident that his plan of escape was practical. He could now point to the elements that would fulfill their needs instead of just being sure that he’d find them somewhere on the atoll.

  “Time to head back, I think,” he said. Before him was another notch into the island’s fabric, this one only about five feet wide at the mouth. “I don’t much like that sky.”

  Cumulus clouds had billowed into a wall across the western heavens. A thunderstorm had caught the Ahura on her first afternoon out of Kostroma. It was so violent that Daniel had shut down the foils, furled the solar sails, and ridden the waves for an hour and a half on waterjet alone.

  “And besides, I could use some lunch,” he added with a grin. “I could catch us each a mudhopper—”

  He gestured to the shoreline. Eyes apparently floating on the water vanished in a swirl of mud.

  “—but I’m not quite hungry enough to eat one raw.”

  Adele nodded. “I think I can live on stored body fat for long enough to get to the camp,” she said.

  She stepped aside to let Daniel lead on the way back as well. He turned—and as he did saw something in the corner of his eye.

  “Ho!” Daniel said. “Oh, will you look at that? Yes, we will stop here.”

  He pointed down the narrow waterway to the clump of rough-barked trees some twenty feet away. On their branches grew fungus in stages of ripeness from white pimples all the way up to swollen yellow balls the size of a man’s head. When fully ripe they dangled from a narrow umbilicus.

  “Soap bubble fungus,” Daniel explained. “It infects several species of nut trees. It doesn’t seem to injure the tree seriously, so it may be a symbiotic adaptation.”

  Adele started to pull out her computer. “No, the Aglaia’s database covered soap bubble fungus adequately,” Daniel said. He spoke softly because of an instinct not to rouse danger, though at this distance he and Adele weren’t in danger. “The only really important thing to know about it is that you don’t want to come within ten feet of it, or twenty if you’re the cautious sort.”

  “It’s poisonous?” Adele said. Even though Daniel had told her not to bother, she was calling up information from the material she’d downloaded this morning.

  Daniel grinned. The way Adele turned to her computer was instinctive too: she didn’t own knowledge unless she’d seen it written. The same words from the same source had more effect written than they did spoken.

  “They’re delicious when ripe, I’m told,” Daniel said as he continued to eye the infected grove. The fullest of the fungus bubbles seemed to quiver with internal life. That was actually possible. “They’d be eaten by every bird or animal within fifty miles before they could open, if it weren’t for the beetles that live inside them.”

  He pointed to the darkest, ripest of the fruiting bodies. “Anything that breaches the rind is set on by a dozen or so insects with bites like red-hot pokers. There’s nothing on Kostroma that deliberately opens the fungus, and animals that do so by accident can be bitten to death.”

  “Even humans?” Adele said, now looking toward the globular fungus. Her control wands were motionless.

  “Especially humans,” Daniel agreed. “There’s a few cases every year, city folk having a picnic and children who haven’t been trained to be careful.”

  He grinned broadly. “I am getting a first-hand look at Kostroman natural history, aren’t I? Rather fortunate to have been wrecked here, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Adele said with her dry smile, “but I’m willing to be happy for you.”

  The rain hit when they were halfway back. At least, Daniel noted, it did something toward washing the caked sweat from their clothing.

  * * *

  By the time Adele and Daniel staggered into sight of the salvage crew on the Ahura she was dizzy with … well, she wasn’t sure where to assign causation. The pain in her arm and shoulder muscles from hanging on while the yacht thrashed in the monster’s grip was a factor. Exhaustion from walking through a landscape that fought her, carrying at the same time several pounds of mud clinging to either foot, was certainly a factor also.

  And she assumed that the oppressive heat and humidity were working on her as well. She’d never before been in a climate where sweat beaded and rolled down her skin because the air was too saturated to accept even the least further increment.

  Adele hoped that fear of the unknown wasn’t weighing on her also. She was lost in a wilderness of the mind, a place where she didn’t know any of the rules. Daniel and his sailors seemed perfectly comfortable here. Perhaps they’d been trained for this sort of uncertainty, in which gunmen might walk into a library at any instant or an ugly-looking fruit could disgorge lethal insects.

  It wasn’t the physical environment that bothered Adele, but rather the randomness of her present life. She was used to the stress of grinding poverty and demanding work, but there’d been a sameness of existence until now. She desperately missed that predictability.

  Woetjans was with the salvage crew. The bosun’s mate wore a look of relief as she saw Daniel reappear from the jungle. Obviously the cycle of random disaster hadn’t ended yet.

  “Sir, we got a problem,” Woetjans said before Daniel could catch his breath at not having to fight the vegetation for a while. “Last night those wog bastards must’ve got the lifeboat from the ship.”

  She nodded toward the Ahura. The stern seemed to have settled lower since Adele last saw it, but Barnes still perched there.

  “I should’ve known there’d be one,” Woetjans continued. “It’s my own damned fault. It was in a compartment under the stern decking, but I’d never thought to wonder why the panel had a red stripe around it. Hafard found it hanging open when she was feeling around in the water this morning.”

  The sailors who’d been nearby on shore came close enough to listen. The pair who were diving in the lagoon paused, clinging to floats made from bundled reeds. They and Barnes looked shoreward, straining also to hear.

  Woetjans handed Daniel a thin metal plate with rivet holes on either end. “This was pinned to the inside of the panel,” she said. “The wogs must’ve known what was there all the time.”

  “Well, they can’t go far in an inflatable boat,” Daniel said. “And if … Oh, I see what you mean.”

  Adele leaned over Daniel’s shoulder to read the legend on the plate. Its raised letters read:

  EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT

  RAFT (CAPACITY 10) AND MOTOR

  SOLAR STILL

  EMERGENCY RADIO

  FISHING L…

  “Oh,” said Adele.

  She took out her personal data unit and seated herself on the ground, using a case of rations as a desk. She crossed her legs reflexively. The jolt of pain from her bruises didn’t hit before she’d started the movement and wasn’t severe enough to prevent her from finishing it. When she was working, nothing short of decapitation was going to stop her.

  Daniel and his sailors were talking and looking toward the next island of the atoll, across the line of reefs. Adele dropped into the universe of her holographic screen. The natural world sloughed from around her.

  She quickly located the first mention of Daniel’s detachment. It was a radioed note from an Alliance liaison officer with the port authorities in Kostroma City to his superior in the Alliance military government. Cinnabar pirates had marooned Kostroman citizens on a barren island but had been stranded on the same island themselves. The Kostromans would guide troops to destroy the pirates.

  Adele smiled slightly as she noted the time slugs on that and the first followup. There’d been no action on the report for several hours. It had been r
eceived not long after midnight, and if anybody noticed it they’d put it in a class with sightings of angelic visitors.

  An officer had probably come in at dawn. Shortly thereafter somebody had refined Ganser’s original SOS, though the exchange wasn’t recorded anywhere Adele could find it. The followup, now reporting Cinnabar naval personnel were operating on Kostroma, had been passed on to Blue Chrome Operations. The invasion force was wholly distinct from the Alliance military government here.

  At this point things happened very fast and were fully recorded in electronic files from which Adele could retrieve them. The link to Ganser was still only the Ahura’s emergency radio, but it and Kostroma’s geopositioning satellites were adequate to the needs of the Alliance.

  Adele finished her survey and leaned back with a sigh. She didn’t shut down but her eyes were far enough back from the focal point that the display merged into a blur of mutually-interfering beams of coherent light.

  Daniel and Woetjans were looking at her. “You’ve got something, Adele?” Daniel asked.

  The whole detachment was now present, Hogg included. The servant looked worn, but the pupils of his eyes were the same size and he walked without help. The whole left side of his face was the livid purple yellow of a decaying bruise.

  The sailors were armed, but the few who carried impellers held them by the barrel as clubs. Knives, spears, and clubs of the native wood predominated.

  “Ganser is in radio contact with the Alliance military authorities,” Adele said. She laid the information out as flatly and simply as possible so that she wouldn’t be misunderstood. “The Kostromans are on the adjacent island, about three hundred meters from the shore nearest to this island. A platoon of Alliance commandoes in an armored personnel carrier will arrive at local midnight to kill or capture the Cinnabar naval personnel and to capture the Kostromans.”

  “Why so long?” Dasi asked. “An APC could make it here from Kostroma City by dusk, even if they just started.”

  “They want us to be asleep,” Daniel guessed.

  “Yes,” Adele said. “Ganser warned them that we were armed. He said they should shoot us on sight and not take any chances.”