With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  The prisoner didn’t speak. He had his feet under him again. Dasi twitched the pole.

  The party plodded the short remaining distance to the inlet where soap bubble fungus grew. Daniel and Adele stood to the side so that the sailors could bring the prisoner up to where he had a good view.

  “Now, Sergeant,” Daniel said with slightly patronizing formality, “this is the situation. We’re going to tie you to one of those trees there—”

  He gestured to the grove twenty feet away. Two naked commandoes were there already, seated on the ground with their hands tied around the trunks of the trees behind them.

  They were dead and their bodies were swollen horribly. A red, two-inch beetle sat motionless on the protruding tongue of one of the corpses. Above each body were the tattered remains of a soap bubble fungus, its core everted from the yellow rind like trails of cotton batting.

  “The fungus is quite tasty,” Daniel said. He smiled. “Not that you’ll have time to appreciate it, I’m afraid. As I said, we’re going to tie you near your friends and walk a good distance away before we start asking you questions. If you answer all the questions completely, then we’ll untie you and take you back to camp. But it has to be a ‘full and frank disclosure,’ as they say.”

  “You can’t do this,” the sergeant whispered hoarsely.

  “That’s a remarkably silly thing to say,” Adele commented. “Given that you can see we already have done it.”

  “He’s woozy from the sting he got last night,” Daniel said soothingly. “Poor man, I’ve heard that a bite from a fungus beetle hurts worse than being stuffed into a hot furnace.”

  He smiled at the prisoner. “But you see,” he went on, “that’s just one bite. If you’re sitting under a nest when my friend here blows it open—”

  Adele raised the pistol high enough from her pocket for the prisoner to see it, then let the weapon slide back.

  “—you’ll be bitten many times. And I’m afraid that’s invariably fatal.”

  Daniel walked toward the grove. He moved as though he were stepping on eggs.

  “Be careful, for God’s sake,” Adele snapped. The concern in her voice was real enough. She knew that Daniel didn’t take risks he thought were excessive, but she wasn’t willing to trust his judgment of “excessive.”

  With thumb and forefinger, Daniel picked the beetle off the corpse’s tongue. He strode back to the others, moving much more quickly.

  He offered the insect to the prisoner. Adele looked closely as well; she hadn’t seen the creatures by good light before. The bright red wing cases were edged with cream. It was quite attractive in its way.

  “They only live a few minutes after they come out of the nest,” Daniel said in a friendly, informational tone. “Striking colors, don’t you think? These aren’t fangs, exactly, they’re really modified antennae, but they certainly carry poison the way fangs do. I guess you know that better than me.”

  Daniel grinned. He wiggled the insect in the direction of the prisoner’s swollen shoulder. The prisoner screamed and tried to twist away. Barnes cuffed him back; he screamed again and slumped.

  Daniel tossed the insect into the lagoon. “Tie him to the tree between those other two,” he ordered. He spit at the floating bug and spun it over in a swirl of bubbles. “And don’t bump the fungus yourself, all right?”

  “What do you want to know?” mumbled the sergeant. “I swear to God, I’m just a soldier, but I’ll tell you what I know.”

  “Let him sit,” Daniel said to Barnes, “but keep hold of the pole.”

  He looked at the prisoner and said, “Where’s the crew of the Aglaia being held? The Cinnabar naval vessel that was in harbor when you landed, the Aglaia.”

  The prisoner’s eyes were closed. “All those guys are locked up in the ship,” he said through thick lips. “Not the officers, though. I think they’re in the palace but I don’t know, I never had that duty myself. They’ll be taken off-planet as soon as the rest of the squadron lands, I heard.”

  Adele withdrew her data unit and seated herself cross-legged in the mud. She got out the wands and began to enter the sergeant’s information.

  “When do you expect the rest of the squadron?” Daniel was asking.

  Kostroman birds and insects buzzed warmly in the grove, devouring the luscious fungus which Adele had shot open earlier in the morning. For the most part, the local creatures ignored the human corpses.

  The Alliance soldiers were among the six who had been killed by multiple bites inside the APC, unable to escape when Adele flung the nest through the hatchway the night before.

  * * *

  Gambier and Barnes had endorsements on their paybooks indicating the RCN thought they could fly ducted-fan vehicles. Half a dozen other ratings had experience as well, either in civilian life or less officially in the service. Daniel didn’t have to worry about who could fly the armored personnel carrier.

  There was plenty else to worry about, of course, but right at the moment Daniel Leary was feeling pretty good. Pretty damned good.

  The APC revved, then lifted. Gambier was at the controls. The sides were folded down as if for a quick insertion, so the ratings in the troop compartment were clearly visible. They and their fellows on the ground cheered as the big vehicle slid along the inlet. It rose slowly until the downdraft no longer exploded the water away to either side.

  “Isn’t it dangerous to have passengers aboard when you’re testing the equipment?” Adele asked as she watched the APC at his side.

  Daniel shrugged. “There might have been a problem getting off the ground,” he said, “though it’s all pretty automated.”

  Adele turned her head to look at him. “I suppose if you’d thought it was really dangerous,” she said, “you’d have been aboard yourself.”

  Daniel grinned. “I didn’t think it was dangerous,” he said, avoiding the direct answer that would have made him sound like he was trying to be a hero. The ratings expected an officer to share their dangers; to avoid doing so would be unprofessional.

  Likewise, it would be unprofessional for an officer to involve himself in the common dirtiness of naval life, washing dishes or scrubbing grease from hydraulic control systems. That was where the extreme democrats went wrong. Though …

  He’d now gotten to know the surviving representative of the Mundys of Chatsworth, the family who according to Corder Leary were the life and breath of radical democracy on Cinnabar. Adele wasn’t what Daniel would call a radical democrat.

  Perhaps there’d been some misrepresentation on both sides of the question. That was pretty generally true in politics, he supposed.

  Daniel glanced higher into the wedge of sky visible past the overhanging trees. “Someday I’d like you to help me with the constellations from here,” he said. “The Kostromans do name their constellations, don’t they? I guess I was just assuming they do.”

  “What?” said Adele. “I have no idea, but I’ll find out.”

  She sat on the ground and brought up her little computer. Daniel hadn’t meant Adele to dig into the problem immediately. “Someday” meant to him “when things have settled down.”

  Realistically, things weren’t going to settle down while he was on Kostroma. Though for his own sense of well-being he had to pretend this was an aberration in the life of a naval officer, that the normal routine would soon return.

  Daniel squatted beside Adele, his arms wrapped around his knees and his buttocks slightly above the ground. Not that he could get much muddier …

  “The trick would have worked just as well if we’d done it in all truth,” he said. “Tying live prisoners under a fungus bubble and letting the beetles kill the first one or two if they didn’t talk.”

  The note of the APC’s fans changed from a pulse to a whisper; the ratings had landed on the other island to retrieve items salvaged from the wreck. The APC had more carrying capacity than the little liferaft, and using it provided hands-on experience in a leisured environment.
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br />   “Perhaps,” said Adele, “but we’ll never know.”

  She put her wands down and looked over at Daniel. “People like us will never know. But our way worked.”

  A hand-sized crustacean scuttled from the muddy bank, extended a pair of tentacles to seize a ration can the Kostromans had flung down, and ran back the way it had come. Each segment of the creature’s jointed back had a stalked eye at the midline. They twisted like flowers in a rainstorm to watch the humans.

  The crustacean vanished into the water with its prize; the can gave a plop! as water filled it. The little creature was probably after a home rather than food, but Daniel didn’t know enough about the local biota to be sure.

  “There are constellations, yes,” Adele said. “They seem to be named for geographical features of Topaz, where the colony originated. Would you like to see the display?”

  She offered the data unit. Daniel shook his head, smiling his thanks. “Not right now,” he said.

  He pointed to the trail the crustacean’s many feet had wriggled into the mud. “I was going to put the prisoners on a detail policing up the mess they’d made,” he went on. “The local animals seem to be pleased with the chance to take care of it themselves. Besides, it’s probably best to keep both lots hogtied until we’re ready to leave. I don’t want another slip-up.”

  The prisoners, Ganser’s thugs and the surviving Alliance commandoes, lay like so many duffelbags at intervals along the opposite bank of the inlet. They were bound and anchored by the neck to rooted saplings. Two guards were with them, but the prisoners were visible to the Cinnabars on this side of the water also for additional safety.

  They were gagged. A prisoner who moved more than a guard thought necessary was kicked, but that was a matter of casually brutal control rather than torture.

  “You know,” said Daniel, “if we’d dumped the gang off the end of the dock on Kostroma, we wouldn’t have the APC and Alliance uniforms now. Funny how things work out, isn’t it?”

  Adele sniffed. “That had nothing to do with the decision,” she said. “It shouldn’t have anything to do with any similar decision either. Or are you suggesting that the Lord is with us because our hearts are pure?”

  Daniel laughed loudly and got to his feet. “Your heart may be pure,” he said, “but for my own part I’ve just been too busy. One of Ganser’s little friends doesn’t look half bad in the right light.”

  Adele rose beside him. He looked at her and, now that he’d defused her suggestion with a joke, said, “Adele, I don’t think God will preserve Cinnabar. That’s what the Republic has a navy for, after all. But I do think that the people with least on their consciences sleep better than others do. I like my sleep.”

  He thought about the little blonde with a snake’s tail tattooed from her neck to reappear on her bare midriff, heading lower. In a return to his cheery tone, Daniel added, “And if God wants to throw us a bonus, that’s all right with me.”

  * * *

  Adele sat with her head out of the cupola as Barnes brought the overloaded APC down where the Cinnabar camp had been. Streams of plasma had considerably enlarged the clearing, but all signs of the shelters and goods salvaged from the yacht were gone.

  Water sprayed as the vehicle settled. After the ions had burned long tracks of soil away, rain and seepage through the porous rock had filled the ruin.

  Adele wondered if Daniel was dropping the Alliance soldiers here rather than on the beach to make a point. Daniel Leary was an extremely straightforward man, but she’d realized early after meeting him that he was quite subtle in his direct fashion—when he chose to be.

  It was hard to remember that she’d met Daniel only a week before.

  Barnes adjusted the drive fans to a whining idle. Without orders, Hogg and several of the sailors crammed into the troop compartment rolled the prisoners onto the ground. The Alliance troops were bound individually and roped to one another by their wrists as well.

  Adele lifted herself up to sit on the folded-back cupola hatch. By leaning forward, she could see the Alliance troops as they writhed and splashed, cursing.

  Daniel stood on the vehicle’s side panel folded down into a ramp. He lifted a prisoner’s face from the trench in which she spluttered and supported her until she squirmed into a position that was survivable if not necessarily comfortable.

  “Shut the motors off for a moment, Barnes,” Daniel said. “I want them to be able to hear what I have to say.”

  Sixteen of the Cinnabars, Adele included, wore commando uniforms including the communication helmets. She heard Daniel’s voice clearly over the helmet intercom as well as a faint echo through the air.

  The helmets were fine for now, but they’d have to switch off the radios well before reaching Kostroma City. Even if the Alliance forces were too busy to institute a comprehensive signals watch, chatter in Cinnabar accents over Alliance equipment would raise a red flag.

  The rhythmic hum of the engines sank to a quiver. A squad of sailors dragged the prisoners, still linked, a few yards farther so they couldn’t grab a landing skid as the APC lifted.

  Daniel stepped to the ground and faced the naked prisoners. “There’s enough food and water on this atoll to keep you forever,” he said. “Also we’re leaving most of the rations we brought from the naval stores, here and on the other island. If you don’t like the division of supplies I’ve made between you and Ganser, you can go across and discuss the matter. Or you can join forces, of course.”

  He smiled at the Alliance lieutenant without humor. Adele knew Daniel well enough by now to recognize that he was angry; surprisingly angry, she thought, until she remembered what the plasma-ripped campsite meant to him.

  “The last time I did something like this,” Daniel went on, “I told the people I was marooning that I’d send them help in thirty days if they hadn’t managed to get off the atoll themselves. I’m not saying that now. All you’re getting from me is your lives … which is rather better than you were offering, isn’t it?”

  He stepped up into the troop compartment. “You can’t leave us tied!” a soldier said. The one who spoke was the sergeant who’d first told what he knew about the Aglaia. “We can’t survive unless you cut us loose!”

  Daniel grimaced. “Hogg, throw him a knife,” he said. “Barnes, take us up to a hundred feet and circle the area.”

  Hogg smashed a brandy bottle on the side of the hatchway. As the motors began to grunt under load, he tossed the jagged neck in the direction of the sergeant.

  The sides of the troop compartment were hinged horizontally. They lifted halfway to form railings on either side while the compartment remained open to light and air. Adele slid back into the cupola seat as the vehicle rose.

  Daniel touched her shoulder. “I’ll trade places, if you don’t mind,” he said.

  Embarrassed to have usurped his position—he was commander, of course; what had she been thinking of?—Adele squirmed out of the cupola and into the rear compartment. Sailors made way for her with quiet deference. She looked over the side.

  At the specified altitude, the APC slowly circled the two islands and the reef joining them. An occasional pop in the helmet’s integral headphones told Adele that Daniel was talking to one or more of the sailors on a separate channel. She could listen in if she wanted, but there wasn’t any reason to do so.

  The Ahura’s lifeboat floated in the lagoon, turning slowly in the still water. A slick of pollen and bits of foliage drifted behind the boat. The Alliance soldiers were barely visible past the treetops as they squirmed to free themselves, while on the other island some of the Kostromans were already standing upright.

  “Starboard watch,” Woetjans ordered over the intercom. “Aim at the liferaft.”

  Sailors jostled one another in cheerful surprise, thrusting submachine guns captured from the commandoes over the railing. Adele remained at the rail but she didn’t bother to draw her pistol. Sailors on the other side of the compartment complained good-naturedly. />
  “Open fire!”

  Water exploded in a spray that completely hid the little boat. The air filled with ozone and ionized aluminum even though the troop compartment was half-open. The crackling gun mechanisms echoed like logs splitting.

  “Cease fire!”

  The raft was a tatter of flexible red plastic in the center of foam which spread a hundred feet in all directions. The sailors weren’t marksmen—some must be amazingly bad shots, judging from where their rounds hit—and the light pellets weren’t intended for work at this range. Nonetheless the target had been completely destroyed.

  The APC pulled through a figure-eight that reversed its direction. “Port watch,” Woetjans ordered, “aim at the yacht.”

  There were loud cheers. Most of the remaining sailors had already bent over their railing, hunched and squinting in a variety of distorted notions about how to shoot accurately. One of them—inevitably—jerked his trigger an instant before Woetjans said, “Fire!”

  The upturned stern didn’t vanish, but it began to crumble like a sand castle in the rain. Again Adele saw water spout thirty yards from the intended target, but a submachine gun with a 300-round magazine didn’t require a crack shot to be effective.

  “Cease fire!” Woetjans ordered. “Cease fire, Dasi, or I’ll take the fucking thing away and feed it to you!”

  There was a moment’s silence. The plasma cannon roared. What was left of the Ahura erupted into an iridescent mushroom cloud. The APC rocked with recoil from the one-second jet of ions, each of infinitesimal mass but accelerated to the speed of light.

  Adele heard the cupola hum as it rotated. Nevertheless the second spurt of plasma startled her. Steam and shimmering fire enveloped the remains of the lifeboat.

  The lagoon danced briefly with fairy light as ions recombined to their normal atomic state. That passed, but vari-hued fish, scalded by the manmade hellfire, floated to the surface.

  Daniel stepped out of the cupola. “Barnes,” he ordered on a general channel, “follow the programmed course and speed to Kostroma City. Gambier will spell you two hours out.”