by David Drake
We took the bottom flange loose first, handing the nuts and bolts to Monica as we removed them. “Why are you doing that?” she asked. “Can you reach the blockage that way?”
“No,” I said as I stood and stretched before we started work on the upper flange of the elbow. “This is just so that if the pump turns on while we’re at the intake opening, we don’t get sucked up the pipe.”
“But that can’t happen, can it?” Monica said, frowning.
“It can’t if we take a three-foot section out of the pipe,” I said, handing her the next nut and then knocking the bolt clear to give her also.
I couldn’t imagine Monica throwing the big switch while we were down there, and I’d taken the pump off-line at the console as well. Regardless, we had time to do this job safely. I didn’t see any reason to take risks to save half an hour that we wouldn’t miss.
Lal and I put on air suits but left the helmets off. I had no idea what was in the water beside the worms.
As I started toward the hold, I heard a splash. I ran through the connecting hatch a good deal faster than I’d planned.
Monica was standing out on the ramp. It was only after I’d gotten to the main hatch that I saw what had made the splash: Platt’s body floated in the lagoon.
At least she tossed it over the end of the ramp. There it floated on the other side of the outrigger from where Lal and I would be working on the pipe.
I didn’t say anything, but Monica raised her jaw as she looked at me. She said, “It was about time we got rid of that! It was just covered with a tarp.”
“Time and past,” I agreed, walking to the outrigger and out on it. I looped a line over a top cleat. “I kept meaning to put him out every time we inserted, but I kept forgetting.”
I sat and dangled my legs in the water, wishing we had a proper ladder. Gripping the rope, I let my body down and paddled over to the intake. The magnetic soles kept my feet down and the laden tool kit at my waist gave me almost perfect neutral buoyancy. I could have adjusted that by adding or removing tools, but I was glad not to have to.
I found the underwater intake easily because the open cover plate stood at ninety degrees from the hull. Even without a light, I could see that the grating looked fuzzy instead of a sharp-edged grid of heavy wire. It was moving, like a dog’s fur in a breeze.
“The worms are trying to get in,” Lal said from the other side of the opening. “Why are they doing that, do you think?”
“They probably got sucked in,” I said, thinking about it. “There must be a mother-huge lot of them in this lagoon. Do you suppose they hatched here?”
Lal didn’t answer, but it didn’t matter. They were soft bodied and shouldn’t be a problem if their pureed flesh went into the reaction mass tanks. We’d have picked up worse in most harbors on developed worlds.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll take the grate off, fill the tank, and then put the grate back on before we lift. Otherwise it’ll just jam again as soon as we start the pump.”
“Yes, Captain,” Lal said. He was a skilled and experienced spacer, but anything out of his experience was an impenetrable problem to him. He didn’t even begin to think about it; his mind just switched off.
That was better than getting a lot of backchat from a subordinate, I suppose, but I’d have been glad to get a second opinion on some of this business. It was all new to me too.
There were twelve bolts, threaded into the hull itself. I put them down the throats of our suits rather than chancing trying to put them into the tool kit and maybe losing one. The grate didn’t get a lot of stress when the cover plate was closed, but I didn’t fully trust the cover plate either. I didn’t trust any part of the structure of the Alfraz.
When we got the grating off, I said to Lal, “Get back on the ramp and I’ll hand this up to you. We’ll get the pump running again, then clean this before we put it back on.”
Lal splashed over to the outrigger where he could get onto the ship again. I worked my way along the side with care, using my magnetic boots to grip where there was nothing for my hands.
The grating was in the crook of my right arm, and I held the safety line in my left hand. I couldn’t swim with the weight of the grating, let alone swim with one hand. Keeping my head above water with my feet on the curving hull was like holding a sit-up midway.
Lal reached the midpoint on the ramp when I did. By lying on his belly and reaching down, he managed to take the grating, which allowed me to relax and let my legs drop.
Inside the ship Monica screamed, then shouted, “Help! Help me!”
Lal dropped the grating with a clang and ran into the hold. I tried to lift myself directly onto the ramp, which was stupid. I could’ve done it in shorts and a jersey, but not with the suit and the weight of the tool kit.
Using the rope and all the strength of my arms, I hauled myself to the outrigger and climbed out. Monica called something, but her voice was distorted. I heard the sounds as, “I can’t hold it!”
I ran up the ramp. I couldn’t see Monica, but Lal was using a wrench as a club to pound the yellow-white form that hunched up at the internal hatch. It was a worm like the thousands of worms in the lagoon, but this was the size of a cow.
The cabin hatch burst open—Monica hadn’t gotten to it in time to dog it shut. She shouted a despairing curse. Lal’s blows weren’t even leaving marks on the creature’s hide.
“Don’t touch metal!” I said, pulling the prybar from its loop on my toolbelt.
The worm extended into the cabin like a stream of pus. Its foreparts twisted to the right, probably following Monica whom I couldn’t see. The creature had crawled up the eight-inch pipe and into the hold where I’d taken the section out—for safety, I had thought.
“Don’t touch metal!” I repeated and laid the bar between the live contact of the knife switch and the bulkhead, shorting the load into the steel fabric of the ship.
Metal exploded. Blue coruscance momentarily sprang from every surface. The bar jerked in my gloved hand. It would have thrown me onto my back except for my deathgrip. The current had welded both ends in the microsecond before the circuit breaker flipped.
“Are you all right!” I called. I stepped back from the switch and took off my right glove. The bar was glowing red and had started to burn me. “Monica, are you all right?”
“Yes,” she called. “Is it dead?”
Her voice wavered, but mine too sounded tinny in my own ears. The short circuit had been as loud as lightning striking a power pole twenty feet away.
“It’s dead,” I said, leaning over the worm’s smoking corpse so that I could look around the bulkhead. Monica sat on her mattress, her legs drawn up to her chest and her arms hugging them tightly. Her eyes held mine.
The worm’s head had reached the edge of the bunk when I electrocuted it. Now the body was shrivelling. A pool of liquid continued to spread beneath the charred skin.
“You can touch metal again,” I said. I suddenly realized that until I’d removed the pry bar there was a dead short if I closed the circuit breaker. I stepped back and kicked the middle of the bar with my boot heel, cracking both welds. The bar fell to the deck.
Monica got off the bunk. “Can we get this thing off the ship?” she said, looking down at the worm. She moved sideways as the leaking fluids approached her soft boots.
“I sure hope so,” I said. “Lal, grab this with me and let’s see if we can get it through the main hatch while the skin’s still holding together.”
It smelled awful. A few years ago a fish thirty feet long—I’d never learned what it had been when it was alive—had washed up on the shore of the island where we had a vacation home. It had been dead at least a month and most of the skin had sloughed off. I hadn’t imagined that I would ever smell anything that bad again.
“Let me put a suit on and I’ll help push,” Monica said, trotting over to the suit locker. “I would have gotten the gun from there if there’d been time, but after the thing pushed th
e door open it was between me and the locker.”
I didn’t blame her for wanting to wear protective gear before she touched the worm. This was one of those awful jobs that you did and did your best to forget about afterward.
With Lal holding two handsful of the skin on one side and me doing the same on the other, we were able to get the front of the body over the hatch coaming. It was easy then to slide it across the deck and onto the boarding ramp. By then Monica was ready to help us dump it into the lagoon.
We rolled the worm off the edge of the ramp. At least half its original mass was a tacky smear on the deck.
“I’ll start washing the ship out,” Monica said. “I don’t suppose there’s anything like a mop aboard?”
“Look,” said Lal, pointing into the lagoon.
Platt’s body floated near the ramp. It was wrigglingly fuzzy, much as the grating had been. The birds—the big insects, I guess—were diving down and spearing some of the worms which were burrowing into the floating corpse. They collided with one another in the air, making a louder version of the clattering we’d heard before.
“My God,” Monica said softly. It sounded like a real prayer.
“I’ll see about getting the ship ready to lift,” I said. “I don’t know how much damage the short circuit did.”
“The gun wouldn’t have stopped it, would it?” Monica said.
“I’ll see how much damage I did,” I repeated. “Then I’ll help you and Lal clean.”
* * *
I spent nearly an hour with the circuitry. The console was unharmed—it was completely shielded from the hull.
Most of the time I took involved me poking about in the switch box, where a small circuit board had fed the console’s commands to the pump. It had disintegrated. I literally wasn’t sure what the components had been, let alone being able to replace or bypass them.
Staring at the ruin didn’t make it less complete. I finally gave up and joined my shipmates. They’d made scrubbing pads from rope and garments—a breechclout and a gauzy underlayer of Monica’s shift. Food boxes served as buckets.
“If I’d known we were going to do this,” Monica said brightly as I approached, “I’d have saved Platt’s clothing before I put him over the side.”
“I’m not going to fight the worms for it,” I said, squatting down. The job was almost done, at least as much as it could be with what we had. It would take lye and a good airing to really clean the Alfraz.
“I think the mother must breed in this lagoon to protect the eggs and hatchlings from predators in the open sea. All but the flying ones, of course.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I’d smiled to my shipmates’ hopeful faces, but I let my expression settle back into the resignation which I felt.
“Look,” I said, “we’re not going to be able to head straight for Saguntum as I’d hoped. The pump switch can’t be repaired, and we don’t have enough reaction mass to make the whole voyage. We have to replace the switch.”
“What does that mean?” Monica asked with an appearance of calm. Lal simply watched me, much the way a rabbit might watch a snake.
“Plaquemines is within the amount of reaction mass we’ve got aboard,” I said, hoping that I sounded more confident that I felt. “It’s a developed world, enough that I’d even heard of it on Cinnabar. We’ll be able to replace the switch circuitry there.”
I cleared my throat. “The thing is, the parts and probably labor aren’t going to be really expensive, but they’ll cost more than I’ve got in coins. I’ll need to get a job and raise some money. I don’t think that’ll be hard, but don’t know how long it’ll take. Two, three weeks, I’d guess.”
“You say, ‘not really expensive,’” Monica said. “How expensive is that?”
I was a little disturbed by the intensity with which she looked at me. I shrugged and said, “On Xenos I’d guess about three hundred florins. I don’t know prices on Plaquemines, of course.”
Not for the first time, I regretted that the Alfraz didn’t have a set of Sailing Directions for the region. I’m not sure there was one, but the Fleet had probably compiled a similar set.
“That would be about five hundred Alliance thalers, wouldn’t it?” Monica said.
“About,” I agreed, more than a little surprised that she was familiar with the conversion rate. Cinnabar currency had been unknown on ben Yusuf, and it must be rare even on Saguntum. “I’ve got twenty-two at the moment.”
Monica lifted her hands to her hair and brought down the jeweled barrette she’d taken—back—from Azul the night we escaped. It opened when she squeezed a hidden catch.
A credit chip popped out. She handed it to me and said, “Here. This is good for ten thousand thalers at the Central Bank of Pleasaunce.”
I took it, then raised my eyes to meet hers. Who is she?
“In that case,” I said aloud, “the only trick is getting to Plaquemines. That’s my job.”
I rose from my squat. “I’ll start plotting the course right now.”
I walked to the console. Who the hell is she?
CHAPTER 27
“Karst Registry freighter Alfraz requests landing permission for St. Marie’s Port,” I said on the twenty-meter band. “Alfraz requests to land, over.”
The Alfraz had a microwave suite, but I was a little surprised to hear it chirp, “Plaquemines Control to Alfraz. What is your cargo, Alfraz, over?”
I’d noticed a second ship in orbit a little below us as we approached, but I hadn’t expected it to be a customs vessel. Saguntum had one, but the briefing materials I’d read before the voyage had suggested such formalities were rare in the region. Plaquemines might be a more significant place than I’d expected.
“Plaquemines, this is Captain Olfetrie of the Alfraz,” I said. “We’re landing for minor repairs. We have no cargo, over.”
I hoped that the microwave antenna was self-aiming; that is, that it responded on a reciprocal of the signal it had received. I hadn’t been sure that the microwave worked at all, and I certainly didn’t fancy my chances of manually aiming a tight-beam antenna.
“Proceed to St. Marie Port, Alfraz,” the voice responded. “Do not leave your ship before you’ve been inspected by port officials. Plaquemines Control out.”
“Thank you, Plaquemines Control,” I said. “Alfraz out.”
I looked at my shipmates and said, “They’ve marked a berth for us. Just so you know, I’m going to let the console bring us in down to the last ten feet. I’ll take over there and complete the landing.”
I grinned, but I was pretty nervous about it in truth. “If that turns out to be a bad idea,” I said, “I’ll let the machine do the whole job the next time. Now that we know to brace ourselves good for the last bit.”
I was tired and I hurt all over. Lal and I had been doing the work of six; though the ordinary crew of a tramp in this region would have been three or four rather than six. An air suit didn’t rub as badly as a hard suit did, but it was a protective garment and as rugged to the wearer’s skin as it was to the conditions outside.
The High Drive engaged. When the thrusters took over, the atmosphere began to bounce us around. I don’t suppose I’d ever trust the rig of the Alfraz, but the clamps had been working as well as anyone could ask.
We came low enough to land on our second circuit within the atmosphere. The Alfraz was underpowered—certainly compared to a warship—but her weak acceleration and braking meant that sloppy control linkages didn’t get her into trouble quickly.
I guess I was coming to like the old girl. She was, after all, my first command.
The console guided us toward the berth the port authorities had chosen. St. Marie Port was on a mile-wide river fifty miles up from the coast. The surrounding continent had been a surface of yellow-green vegetation with occasional rectangles of different colors, plantations cut by human settlers.
A red telltale alerted me that the ship’s sensors thought we were twenty f
eet above the surface. I took manual control and locked the thruster output at the current level. We continued to descend on the programmed course, entering the quay from the open mouth. As we slid toward the far end, I adjusted the thruster angle five degrees forward and with my other hand flared the sphincter petals gradually.
The usual gush of steam warned me we were about to touch down. The outriggers hit with solid splashes, the port one an instant before the starboard.
I chopped the throttles and leaned back. It hadn’t been perfect, but it was pretty bloody good. The hours I’d been spending on the simulator had been worth it.
“What do we do now?” Monica said.
“Now, we wait for the local inspectors to clear us,” I said without getting up. I was worse wrung out by the landing than I’d been by the days of doing two men’s work in the rigging. “Same as always.”
I thought for a moment and added, “Except I think I’ll open the ship up a little quicker than I’d do if that worm hadn’t melted the way it did.”
Ozone and garbage burned by the thrusters didn’t seem too bad as an alternative to the present on-board atmosphere.
* * *
“Good heavens,” the inspector said as he stepped into the main hatch. He backed away, then turned and stared at me. “Good heavens!” he said.
“A wild animal got aboard while we were taking on water,” I said. We’d met the official at the foot of the boarding ramp. I’d walked him up while Monica and Lal waited below. “We had to kill it, but the reaction mass pump was damaged. We need to repair that, but we’re also going to pick up cleaning supplies.”
“I should think so!” the inspector said. He craned his neck and looked around the nearly empty hold.
“You’re welcome to search us,” I said. “We recaptured the ship from pirates, and it’d been completely stripped. We just want to get home to Saguntum.”
That was as much fancy as truth, but the official didn’t need details which would just confuse him. He could see we didn’t have any dutiable goods aboard.