by David Drake
“They’re fucked,” said Caffey in a grim voice. “The commo’s fucked. And we’re fucked.”
The torpedoman had clipped a light machine-gun—his personal weapon, since they weren’t stock issue for hovercraft—to the seaward rail. The gun tub was rotated inland, covering the pool fifty feet away where the giant snake and spider had hunted, but no direction was safe.
Brainard glanced at Caffey without speaking. The torpedoman grimaced, then broke eye contact by calling to his striker, “Wheelwright! Bring another drum of ammo.”
Wilding slid into the cockpit and reconnected the hose to his environmental suit. The seepage of cool, dry air through the suit’s lining steadied his mind before it could make any practical difference to his body.
Brainard had brought the console displays up as soon as the auxiliary drive provided power for them. The radio transmitted an any-station emergency signal; K67’s main computer would key the crewmen’s commo helmets if there were a response.
There wasn’t a damn thing else to do, except check the balloon ascender gear. The console had a scarlet Not Ready message under that heading.
A glance astern showed why. K67 had been inverted at some point as she spun ashore. The last five feet of the deck had been scraped, carrying away two decoy launchers and the long-range communications apparatus.
For the first time since a cruiser invisible over the horizon began to shell them, Wilding had leisure to consider their situation. Caffey was right. They didn’t have a prayer.
K67 lay in a salt marsh inside this nameless island’s outer barrier of coral. The coral had shredded the hovercraft’s skirts, but that was probably the reason any of them were still alive. A rigid-hulled vessel would have disintegrated on impact, but the tough, flexible skirts had scrubbed away K67’s velocity as they abraded.
Air-cushion torpedoboats hung their pair of primary weapons in the plenum chamber. Both torpedoes had been torn from their mountings as K67 bellied into the bog. Their safety mechanisms kept them inert despite the shock.
The torpedoes lay like a pair of broken sticks in the path the hovercraft had torn through the vegetation. The body of one had been crushed like a pinched grassblade, while the warhead of the other lay askew with half its attachment lugs stripped. Hungry reeds nuzzled the weapons in vain.
The warheads contained a nominal thousand pounds of barakite explosive. Their blast was designed to penetrate the main armor belt of a superdreadnought. If either weapon had detonated during the crash, there would have been nothing left of K67 and her crew.
Inshore, the jungle ascended in terraces of dark green toward the peak that the hovercraft’s database indicated was a thousand feet above mean sea level. Mist and the foliage bulging from the slopes prevented Wilding from checking the accuracy of the charts.
Far to seaward, a storm or the broadsides of massed battlefleets thundered. The jungle responded with a fluting cry that seemed even more terrible because of its supernal beauty. Wilding shivered.
“I could maybe get Number One fan spinning, sir,” said Leaf. “The blades are dinged, that’s all. But we can’t pressurize the plenum chamber with just one fan.”
“You’ve studied this stuff, haven’t you?” Brainard said.
“There aren’t any skirts left to patch, anyhow,” Caffey said morosely. He massaged his chest where the crash harness had held him during the multiple impacts. The gesture reminded Wilding of how much his own ribs hurt.
“Where’s Holman?” Newton asked. “When’s he comin’ back for us?”
The coxswain sounded curious rather than aggrieved. He stared out to sea.
There was no sign of K67’s consort, but the surface boiled in a natural frenzy. Living things devoured one other and the flesh of creatures the salvos had killed.
“Wilding!” Brainard snapped. “You studied surface life, didn’t you? Your file says you did.”
Wilding turned around, blinking in surprise. The CO had been talking to him.…
Brainard’s face was hard. Not angry, but lacking any sign of weakness or mercy. The ensign was three calendar years younger than Wilding himself, but Brainard had been born with a soul as solid as the planetary mantle. He belonged here, and maybe the other crewmen did as well; but Hal Wilding would vanish in this environment as swiftly as the tags of bloody froth where the sharks fed.
“Yessir, that’s right,” Wilding said aloud. He heard with horror the crisp insouciance with which he clothed his words. It was the only protection he had, and it was no protection at all. “I have some course work in ecology.”
Brainard wasn’t one of his Twelve Family acquaintances, before whom Prince Hal needed to conceal serious endeavor. “Ah, I completed a degree program, as a matter of fact.”
Wilding looked up at the jungle humping into the white sky behind them. “I don’t have a great deal of specific knowledge, though. The rate of mutation here is so high that new data is generally obsolete by the time it’s catalogued.”
“I’ll tell you where that bastard Holman is,” Caffey muttered to the coxswain. “He’s left us here because he’s too chickenshit to risk coming ashore to take a look for us.”
Brainard turned and pointed his right index finger at the torpedoman. “Drop that,” he said quietly. “Nobody’s been abandoned.”
“That last salvo may have been right on top of them,” Wilding suggested. He tried to remember the moments in which the manmade waterspout swelled to engulf K67. “They were—”
“Drop that!” Brainard repeated, the syllables sharp as gunshots. Wilding’s tongue and heart froze.
“We aren’t K70’s problem,” Brainard continued softly. “We’re our problem. We’re alive, we’ve got our equipment. So we’re going to make things all right.”
“We got fuel for three months, just running the auxiliary,” Leaf said. His voice was surprisingly perky considering the shape he’d been in minutes before.
“If the auxiliary don’t pack it in, you mean,” retorted Caffey.
“We should be all right for food,” Wilding said, pretending that he didn’t believe the torpedoman’s gloom was a realistic assessment of their chances. “We can supplement emergency rations with the flesh of most of the animals. Maybe even a few plants.”
“The laser communicator can double as a portable,” Brainard said, ignoring everyone else’s comments. “Is it still functioning?”
“Look, Fish,” Leaf said to the torpedoman, “the auxiliary’ll still be running after you ’n me ’re fertilizer. Anyway, I could rig Number One motor to power the air system.”
Wilding unlatched the laser unit and lifted it so that the prongs feeding power were free of the jack on the bottom of the chassis. The self-contained module had its own sighting and stabilization apparatus. It was supposed to be capable of an hour’s continuous operation on its integral batteries.
Wilding switched the unit on. It ran its self-test program without hesitation. “Checks out,” he said and lowered it into its cradle again. A weight of fifteen pounds made the module portable, but not exactly handy.
“Hey!” shouted Yee from the gun tub. “Hey!”
Everyone turned to follow the line the twin guns pointed to starboard. Thirty feet from K67, a bubble of methane rose to the surface of the bog and plopped.
Twenty feet beyond, in line with the wrecked torpedoboat, a six-foot dimple in the marsh marked the spot a previous bubble had burst.
Yee fired a short burst. The muzzle blasts flattened a broad arc of the nearest vegetation. Explosive bullets cracked into the reed tops with dazzling flashes. The gun tub would not depress low enough to rake the semi-solid ground.
“Cease fire!” Brainard ordered. “Cease fire! Everybody get sidearms. We’ll wait by the rail for it to surface!”
Reeds smoldered where the bursting charges had ignited them. The air was bitter with the mingled stench of explosives and burning foliage. A gray haze drifted away from the torpedoboat.
Another bubble broke su
rface ten feet closer.
Caffey struggled to unclamp his machine-gun from the port rail. Leaf, moving without wasted effort, unclipped an automatic rifle from the motormen’s station and tossed it to his striker. The short blade clicked from his multitool. Newton and Wheelwright scrambled for their personal weapons. The CO was already pointing his rifle over the rail at a 60° angle.
Wilding wore a pistol as part of his uniform. He knew from his several attempts at qualification firing that the weapon might as well be back at the Herd’s shore installation for all the good he could accomplish with it. He ran to the bow, skirting Caffey in a tense pirouette as the torpedoman freed his machine-gun and turned with it.
Wilding’s air line disconnected and reeled itself back into the cockpit. The suit’s impermeable outer skin slapped him like a wet sandbag. The two decoy dispensers forward had come through K67’s grounding without damage. They were simply spigot mortars from which small propellant charges would lob the decoys.
“Look,” one of the crewmen cried, “he’s running!”
Wilding wasn’t running. There was no place to run.
Each decoy was a bomb-shaped projectile weighing about fifty pounds. At the first dispenser, Wilding broke the safety wire which locked the fuze until the dispenser fired. He spun the miniature propeller on the projectile’s nose to complete the arming procedure. The decoy was not supposed to burst until it was at least thirty feet from the vessel launching it.…
The propeller came off in Wilding’s hands and tinkled to the deck, arming the decoy. He lifted the decoy in a bear hug and staggered to the starboard rail with it. He couldn’t see past the bulky cylinder.
“Get b—!” he shouted and slammed into the starboard rail. The impact knocked the breath out of his body and tipped the projectile nose-first into the bog.
Brainard grabbed a handful of Wilding’s suit and jerked the officer-trainee back to safety as the decoy fell.
The nose of the decoy sank into the soft ground before the bursting charge went off with a whump! and drove a pair of binary chemicals together. The mixture expanded as a bubble of heavy gas formed a skin with the moisture in the air and ground.
The gas was a brilliant purple-gray and so hot that it blistered the hovercraft’s refractory plastic hull. At sea the decoy would skitter over the tops of the waves, drawing enemy fire and attention until it cooled and flattened into an iridescent slick. Here—
K67’s crew stumbled to the vessel’s port side, driven by heat from the swelling decoy. A claw eighteen inches long drove through the glowing boundary layer of decoy and atmosphere, clacked twice, and then withdrew on its jointed arm. The muscles within the crustacean’s translucent exoskeleton had already been boiled a bright pink.
Five guns dimpled the decoy’s opaque surface with automatic fire.
“Cease fire!” Ensign Brainard ordered again. “We’ll need the ammo soon enough.”
Wilding got his breath back. He straightened. Brainard released him. The decoy began to ooze sluggishly away from the torpedo boat. It seared a broad track into the reeds behind it.
“All right,” said Brainard without emotion. “This boat’s shot. That’s too bad, but we’re still okay ourselves.”
He looked from one crewman to the next, his eyes hard and certain. Wilding held his breath while Brainard’s glance rested on him. “We’re going to need more height in order to lase a signal to somebody who can rescue us. Since we don’t have the ascender apparatus any more, we’re going to climb that mountain.”
He nodded in the direction of the island’s hidden peak.
“God almighty, sir!” Caffey gasped. “We can’t march through that jungle. Nobody could!”
Brainard looked at the torpedoman. The ensign’s face was as calm as the sea, now that the feeding frenzy had burned itself out.
“No, Fish,” Brainard said. “We’re going to do it. Because that’s what we have to do to survive.”
NOVEMBER 6, 381 AS. 1500 HOURS.
“I don’t think,” said the Callahan, a man of fifty whose features were as smooth and handsome as the blade of a dress dagger, “that we need wait for the others.”
His finger brushed a control hidden in a tabletop carved from a single mother-of-pearl sheet. The chamber’s armored door slid shut, separating the Council of the Twelve Families from the crowd of servants in the anteroom.
The panel staggered as it mated with the slot inlet in the jamb. The machinery made a grunching sound.
Hal Wilding looked around the council chamber, cloaking his disgust beneath his usual sardonic smile. Nine of the twelve chairs around the circular table were occupied, but in three cases the occupant was only physically present.
The McLain was senile.
After a series of brutal tongue-lashings by the Callahan, the Hinson had learned to keep his mouth shut during council meetings; a success of some degree for a man with an IQ of 70, but a dog could have been trained more easily.
The Platt had mixed recreational drugs in an unfortunate combination. For the past ten years he had had little more brain activity than a wax dummy. His family continued to send him to council meetings, because if they removed their titular head, they would be faced with an internal struggle for succession.
The Wilding’s seat was filled by the eldest son of the House.…
“I called this meeting when I saw the catch projections for the next twelve months,” said the Callahan with his usual lack of ceremony. “They can be expected to drop to sixty percent of their current levels in that time—and current levels are already a third down on really satisfactory quantities.”
The Galbraith frowned and fluffed his lace shirt out from beneath the sleeves of his frock coat. “Can’t we build more netters and bring in more food, then?” he asked.
“That’s the problem, you see, Galbraith,” Wilding said. “We’re already overfishing our grounds. That’s the main reason the stocks have crashed.”
The Callahan nodded. “Yes, that’s correct,” he said. “The problem is with empty holds, not lack of netting capacity.”
Whenever the Callahan looked at Wilding, it was with cool appraisal for a potential rival. Wilding understood the attitude very well.
Wilding smiled coldly. With the rate of mutation and adaptive radiation on this planet, it was easy to imagine the appearance of life forms able to prey upon even the huge submarine netters which supplied the keeps with fish.
“Well, it’s not as though anybody’s going to starve, is it?” the Penrose said. “There’ll still be plenty of vegetable protein.”
“It’s not starvation we need to worry about, it’s riots,” said the Callahan.
“You’d riot too, Penrose, if you had nothing to eat but processed algae,” gibed the Galbraith.
The Penrose chuckled and patted the vest over his swollen belly. “No, no,” he said. “We certainly can’t permit that. What’s the alternative?” He was looking at the Callahan.
Wilding interjected crisply, “We could colonize the land. That would provide additional resources.” Wilding felt cold. He hadn’t been aware of what he was going to say until the words were out of his mouth. As soon as he spoke, he realized that the sub-strata of his mind had planned the statement from the moment he decided to attend the council meeting.
He wasn’t sure what response he expected. What he got was averted faces from everyone in the room except the Callahan.
The Callahan said in an icy voice, “Master Wilding, if you wish to dance through life, that is your right. You do not have the right to interfere with those of us who are keeping the system going.”
The two men stared at one another. At last, Wilding shot his cuff, withdrew a snuffbox carved from a block of turquoise, and snorted a pinch from the crease of his hand and thumb.
“I believe the best course is to send our netters into the grounds of Asturias Keep,” the Callahan resumed. “That will mean war within six months, so I suggest we start negotiations with one of the merce
nary companies at once.”
“Wysocki’s Herd did a good job for us three years ago,” the Galbraith said. “Shall we try them again?”
“I’m not sure six months is soon enough,” said the Penrose, frowning. “The shortages will be obvious well before then. Perhaps we ought to speed matters up by leaking our plans directly to Asturias, rather than letting them learn when our netters are spotted.”
“Oh, I believe the time frame should be adequate,” said the Callahan. “We’ll just need to inflate all their initial statements before we release them to the public. Say, three months before Asturias realizes what we’re doing, and another three months of drawing out negotiations before it comes to war.”
The Dahlgren was by far the eldest of the functional council members, but he lacked the drive that made the Callahan a leader. He nodded and said, “Yes, that’s the better course. Twice the effect for the cost, very practical.”
“I fail to see the practicality,” said Wilding in tones of chilled steel, “since Asturias Keep has almost certainly overfished its own grounds as badly as we have ours. We need to expand our sources of sup—”
“I’m afraid you’ve missed the point, boy,” said the Callahan. “The war emergency will take the mob’s attention off the shortages. Shortages will be expected, in fact. Then, in the six months or so that our grounds go uncropped, the stocks will rebuild—whether or not the netters bring an ounce of protein from Asturias’s grounds.”
“I thought in past years,” said Wilding, enunciating perfectly and locking his glare with that of the Callahan, “that Wyoming Keep’s apparent lack of direction was because I heard council decisions filtered through my father’s perceptions.” He sniffed. “Or lack of perceptions. But I now realize that he was perfectly accurate. If this is an example of the policy of the Twelve Families, then the policy of the Twelve Families is bankrupt. Manipulating the common people to accept wretched conditions is pointless when we could be improving those conditions.”
“You know, boy…,” the Callahan snarled.
All eyes in the council chamber were on Wilding. Some expressions were hot, some cold; all were full of hatred.