With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  “Wish we were armed,” said Lamsoe. “Wish to fuck we were armed.”

  He looked wistfully at his impeller. A piece of flexible plastic dangled from the battery compartment. Lamsoe had disconnected the power pack so that there was no risk of his accidentally pulling the trigger and shorting the mechanism explosively.

  Daniel looked at his chronometer, returned it to his pocket, and smiled purposefully to Adele and his sailors. “That gives us seven hours,” he said. “Now, the first thing we’ll need—”

  * * *

  Daniel swept the opposite shore slowly with his goggles set to maximum magnification on thermal imaging, then swept it again with the magnification backed off to normal. There was always the possibility that a glitch in the imaging software would mask a target when two systems were combined and pushed to their limits.

  This wasn’t a time Daniel could afford a glitch.

  He took off the goggles and handed them to Woetjans, beside him in the undergrowth. The remainder of the detachment was a silent presence several feet deeper in the jungle, where the thick foliage would mask their body heat from any detection apparatus Daniel knew of. The Kostromans probably didn’t have infrared equipment, but Daniel’s margin of error was too slight for him to make things worse by any assumed “certainties.”

  “I don’t see any sign of a guard,” he said. “Keep watching, of course.”

  Daniel stretched to full height, bracing his paired hands on a treetrunk. He’d stripped to a belt, a sheath knife from one of the ratings, and his shorts. Woetjans held a long reel of fishing line whose free end was tied to Daniel’s belt.

  The shorts weren’t for modesty but from a due concern for small swimming things that might nibble or sting in the darkness. A nipped toe wouldn’t be disabling.

  “I’ll be off now,” he said. He walked toward the water, feeling the gritty soil change to mud between his toes.

  “Sir,” said Woetjans as she stepped out of the undergrowth beside him. “I wish—”

  “I’m the best swimmer in the detachment,” Daniel said. “If there’s a problem, Cafoldi’s my backup. but you have to get a strike force to the Kostromans tonight. Now, go back to your duties.”

  At this moment Daniel wanted only to get on with the task, but he didn’t let his nervous fury cause him to lash out at the petty officer. Woetjans was just as worried at being left in charge of a situation without clear orders as Daniel was at swimming the strait separating the islands. It ought to work out for both of them, but only a fool wouldn’t wonder.

  “Yessir,” Woetjans said. She saluted and vanished into the jungle.

  Daniel entered the water. It felt warmer than the night air on his naked skin. He began a leisurely breast stroke toward the distant shore, giving the wrecked yacht a wide berth.

  Sundown was less than an hour past, but the night was so black that only by the pinpricks of starlight could Daniel separate the sky from the land and sea. Both Kostroma’s tiny moons were up but they were scarcely more than bright planets even when full.

  The tide was rising and currents flowed strongly through the reef from the ocean beyond. Daniel drifted farther into the lagoon; he changed his angle, stroking at a slant against the current in order to hold his intended landfall.

  In a perfect world Daniel would have been making this swim between tides when the water was still; though now that he thought about it, in a perfect world there wouldn’t be any need for him to swim at all. At least he didn’t have to do it when the tide was going out and the rip pulled him toward the fanged reef closing the interval between islands.

  Daniel still would have tried. The task was necessary, and the likelihood that it would be fatal wouldn’t make it optional.

  Something bumped him. He lost a stroke in frozen surprise. More things nudged him and slid off with rubbery persistence.

  Unblinking eyes humped the water. Forms squirmed past Daniel into the lagoon like a bubble slick. The contacts were mindless, harmless; mere collisions in the night. An enormous shoal of soft-bodied creatures was entering the lagoon with the tide and darkness to feed.

  All Daniel could see were the eyes. He couldn’t guess the creatures’ body shape from their boneless touch, but the largest were at least the length of his forearm.

  Daniel continued to stroke, hindered by the creatures’ presence. More serious were the jerks and tugs from behind as the shoal snagged the fishline as well. If the line broke, he’d have to do this all over again.

  So be it. He’d take the process one stroke at a time, as he always did. At least he’d learned how the sweep had been able to feed itself to such monstrous size.

  He swam with his head out of water so that he could see the shore at all times. There was nothing to see, and no likelihood that Daniel would be able to tell in this darkness if Ganser’s whole band was waiting to spear him like a fish caught in the shallows.

  His thigh muscles were hurting very badly. He felt an incipient cramp as he bunched for another frog kick; instantly he relaxed and lay in a dead man’s float while he prayed that he’d been in time.

  He had. The big muscles of his right thigh didn’t wind themselves into a furious knot as they’d been on the verge of doing, but Daniel didn’t dare risk them further tonight.

  He swam on, using only arm strokes. His legs dangled behind him like those of a broken-backed dog.

  Daniel had overstressed his thighs when he clung to the impeller mount, and he was out of shape. No point in lying to himself: Daniel Leary wasn’t as fit as an RCN officer needed to be. If anything happened to the ratings he commanded, it was his fault in all truth as well as by regulation.

  Daniel’s shoulders weren’t in any better condition than his thighs, but the back muscles were less likely to cramp from an inability to dispose of waste products. He was losing strength, though. He needed to reach land soon or he was going to find himself with no option but to float until somebody noticed him at daybreak.

  Daniel Leary, floating with the corpse of a sweep the size of a yacht. Well, he hadn’t let himself get so fat that there’d be doubt about which was which.

  He chuckled, a mistake in that it put off his timing and he breathed water. Maybe a good thing anyway; humor was never out of place in a tight situation.

  Besides, he was close to his goal. He could smell the mud, though the toe he dabbed down didn’t find bottom. A few feet more—

  Something whacked him in the chest. This was a real blow, not the squirming touch of a creature riding the currents. Daniel’s head went under water before he could close his mouth.

  Fear of someone on shore watching for a disturbance didn’t check Daniel’s deep lizard-brain fear of drowning. He rose, flailing and spluttering.

  He couldn’t see anything on the surface. Had he struck a submerged treetrunk? It’d felt solid enough.

  Treading water carefully in hope that his thighs wouldn’t pack up on him now, Daniel felt in front of him with his outstretched left hand. He didn’t touch anything.

  He stroked forward again. Something punched him on the left side. As he lurched, he took another underwater blow to the center of his chest.

  Daniel knew what the problem was now, and he knew what to do about it. He just wasn’t sure that he’d be able to do what was necessary in his present physical condition.

  There was a colony of giant tube-worms on his side of the channel, harmless filter-feeders. They rose from their tunnels after dark to sweep the water about them with feathery gills which they withdrew into their bodies every few minutes to ingest the microorganisms trapped in the gills’ netlike structure.

  The problem was that though the worms lived in colonies, each protected its immediate hunting ground by butting away rivals which tried to tunnel into the mud too close. These worms thought Daniel was one of their own kind, and they didn’t intend to let him settle in the territory they’d already claimed.

  Daniel turned and paddled feebly parallel to the shore. He’d used a good dea
l of his strength fighting the tide when it tried to push him in this direction; now when he could use some help he was in quiet water.

  He could really use some help. Well, so could his detachment. What Adele and the ratings had was Daniel Leary, and on his honor that would be enough.

  Twice he turned toward shore again. Twice the clamped gill covers of an outraged worm prodded him back. He giggled: Kostroman tube worms had a sense of honor very similar to that of Cinnabar nobles. All this time he’d thought society on the two planets was very different.

  He supposed the pain in his lungs and shoulders was giving him hallucinations. Well, his present reality had very little to recommend it.

  Daniel wasn’t fully aware that his fourth attempt to reach shore had succeeded until his left hand dug into mud. He collapsed, still in the water, and dragged sobbing breaths into his lungs. It was nearly a minute before he managed to crawl out of the lagoon and stand upright.

  A bush rubbed him; its leaves felt like sandpaper. He ignored them and waved toward the shore he’d left a lifetime ago. Woetjans would be watching through the goggles.

  Daniel tested the fishline. It still had the tension of its own full length. Slowly, careful not to snap it now against an unseen snag, Daniel began to hand in the line and the heavier cord that his ratings would by now have fastened to its end.

  * * *

  A bird whose wings were a meter across swooped over the lagoon with a coo-o-o, then vanished again in the overhanging trees. Adele jumped; the Kostromans across the twenty feet of water from her bellowed and sprang away from their campfire. One of them got to his feet and hurled a stone into the night when he was sure that the creature was gone.

  The thugs settled again. One of them tried to build up the fire, but the wood he added was damp. The flames sank to a hissing glow and the rest of the gang snarled curses at him. They were very nervous.

  They had even better reason to be than they knew.

  Adele shivered. The air, though warm in any normal sense, cooled her by evaporation as it dried the salt water from her skin. She’d been too exhausted to eat when she and Daniel returned from scouting, and she hadn’t eaten later because tension and the flurry of activity had masked her hunger.

  Now she was cold and wet and alone in the darkness. She liked to think of herself as a creature of the mind, but her body was reimposing its own reality.

  She’d know better the next time. The thought of there being a next time like this made her grin despite herself: Dangerous Adele, the Pistol-Packing Librarian.

  She sobered. There probably would be a next time, if she survived this one.

  The Kostromans subsided into glum speculation again. They were urban thugs, as unused to these sorts of conditions as Adele herself was, and they didn’t have her self-disciplined willingness to deal with a situation as she found it.

  Ganser had pulled into a notch midway along the lagoon side of this islet. He hadn’t built a real camp. Open ration cans winked orange in the firelight; one floated near where Adele crouched on the opposite shore.

  The inflatable liferaft was drawn up on the mud near the fire. Adele wondered if it was tied. The thugs probably didn’t think they’d need the boat again, but the Cinnabar sailors certainly did.

  She and the Cinnabar sailors. For the first time since the Mundys of Chatsworth were massacred, Adele Mundy belonged to a group.

  Something plopped loudly in the lagoon. A thug cried out and turned. The rhythm of night-sounds shifted for a moment after the cry, then resumed at its previous level.

  Daniel Leary stepped out of the undergrowth on the other side of the Kostromans’ fire. He carried a wooden baton a meter long.

  “Good evening,” Daniel said. “Surrender quietly right now. You’re surrounded.”

  The thugs bawled and scrambled away from the fire. One of them aimed a submachine gun at Daniel. Adele was no longer cold. She shot the gunman in the knee. The gunman screamed in rising pain and fell backward.

  Ganser swung at Daniel. Daniel jabbed his baton into the thug’s soft belly, then rang the wood off Ganser’s scalp as he doubled over.

  A Kostroman squatting at the edge of the light had a submachine gun also. Adele hadn’t noticed it until the thug pulled the trigger. They’d retrieved guns from the lagoon, but unlike the sailors they hadn’t even tried to wash the salt out of the circuitry.

  The submachine gun blew up in a vivid green flash: its battery had shorted through the mechanism. Vaporized metal and globs of burning plastic casing splattered in all directions like the contents of an incendiary grenade.

  Daniel shouted, but the thugs themselves caught most of the fireball. Woetjans and Barnes burst from the undergrowth to either side of their commander and joined him in clubbing every Kostroman still standing.

  Adele didn’t shoot again. She didn’t have a safe target, and the three Cinnabars across the inlet didn’t need her help.

  The only rope the Cinnabars had that was long enough to span the strait between the islands was Kostroma-made and only a quarter-inch diameter. Daniel was unwilling to stress it with more than one person at a time crossing hand over hand to the other side. If there’d been more time the sailors could have braided a bark hawser; but there wasn’t time, for that or much of anything else.

  Three Cinnabars had crossed to join Daniel. Adele was the first, because of her pistol and her skill with it. Barnes and Dasi were supposed to follow, but Woetjans had come in Dasi’s place.

  The fight in the Kostroman camp, such as it was, ended. Daniel swayed, panting as he held his club by both ends. He looked across the notch of water and called, “Don’t try to come around, Adele. We’ll bring you over in the boat as soon as we’ve got this lot tied.”

  The four Cinnabars had worked their way up the shore from the island’s tip until they found the Kostroman camp on the other side of this inlet. They hadn’t been able to make a plan until they saw the location. Adele had been the one to suggest she stay here where she had a better line of fire than she’d have if she worked around with the others.

  She’d felt alone as she waited for Daniel to strike. That wasn’t a problem; she’d felt alone for most of her life.

  A thug keened in a high-pitched voice that cut through the moans and sick-hearted curses of the others. The one she’d shot, perhaps; or the one who’d incinerated herself by pulling the submachine gun’s trigger.

  Adele had a good view of the camp from here, but it hadn’t been good enough. If the submachine gun had worked, Daniel Leary would be dead. She didn’t see any way the group could survive if they lost Daniel.

  In rational moments she didn’t see how they would survive under Daniel’s command either, but it was surprisingly easy in the young lieutenant’s presence to suspend disbelief.

  Adele looked at the water, then tucked the pistol into the purse she wore on her waistbelt. “I’m coming across,” she said. She walked into the inlet.

  At midpoint the channel was deep enough that Adele had to splash in an awkward parody of swimming. There was no current; the bottom muck, though unpleasant, slid off her skin like thick oil instead of gripping her. A week ago—a day ago—she’d never have considered plunging into water foul with jungle decay, but her standards of acceptability had slipped.

  Daniel gave her a hand out. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “We can’t afford to take unnecessary risks.”

  “Nor can we afford to waste time,” Adele said tartly. That wasn’t the real reason she’d walked across, though. She was punishing herself for missing the second gunner until it would have been too late.

  Woetjans and Barnes were tying the prisoners with the same cord by which Adele and the two sailors had crossed the strait. The campfire had been trampled in the fighting, but it perversely burned brighter than it had under the Kostromans’ leisured direction.

  Adele took her pistol out of the purse. Daniel looked down at the prisoners. Several were conscious but they waited stolidly to be tied a
gain. Blood still pulsed from where the club had laid open three inches of Ganser’s scalp.

  “I suppose I need to put a pressure bandage on that,” Daniel muttered; but he didn’t seem ready to do so quite yet.

  Daniel was still breathing hard. A spatter of flaming plastic had blistered his right forearm; he hadn’t dressed it yet.

  He reached again into the first aid kit Woetjans had brought over. The horribly burned shooter lapsed into slobbering silence. Daniel put the injector back in its clamp in the kit.

  “I already gave her three ampules,” he said softly to Adele. “It’s a waste of drugs, but it was that or knock her head in. I didn’t want to do that, but if she hadn’t shut up …”

  “What about the one I shot?” Adele asked. She didn’t know which Kostroman it had been. She’d seen the gun and fired, picking her target by instinct rather than design.

  “On the end,” Daniel said, nodding to the edge of the firelight. “I gave him a shot too, so he wouldn’t go into shock. He’ll be all right. He’ll live, anyway.”

  “That’s the lot, sir,” Woetjans said as she straightened.

  “Right,” said Daniel. “Woetjans, you take the lifeboat back and gather up the others. It’ll take two trips, I think, to bring them and the gear we’ll need.”

  He smiled at his surroundings with what Adele thought was anticipation. “The rest of us’ll get to work here, readying things for our friends from the Alliance.”

  * * *

  The emergency radio was a flat box that hummed softly. Every ten seconds the output display beside the speaker spiked, indicating that the unit continued to send a homing signal.

  “I hear ’em coming,” whispered Woetjans. “Hear it? Like thunder a hundred miles off, that’s the lift fans.”

  Daniel spread his hand for silence. The radio’s integral microphone wasn’t very sensitive, but they didn’t need to take chances.

  Eleven Cinnabars sat around the fire, wearing Kostroman civilian clothing with an addition of Zojira black and yellow. Woetjans was trying to use the excess in her trousers’ waistband to make up what was lacking in inseam length; to say Ganser’s clothes were a bad fit for her would be putting it mildly. Other ratings weren’t much better off.