by David Drake
“… when I was informed that you would be representing your family, I was pleased.” The Callahan nodded around the table. “Yes, pleased. Because I foolishly thought that you might be turning over a new leaf. I see now that I was wrong. You’re simply a destructive dilettante, looking for something new to smash.”
“You should let your father come in the future,” said the Penrose. “After all, all the Wilding did was drool—and that was easy enough for the servants to clean up after the meetings.”
Wilding stood. His whole body was trembling. He could not have spoken, even if he could think of something to say.
“You know, Prince Hal,” said the Galbraith, “if you’re so concerned about injustice to the common people, you should give up your perquisites and join them. Once you acclimate, I suspect you’ll find the mob’s round of drink, drugs, and sex much the same as that of your own circle.”
Wilding began walking toward the door. He could not see for the red blur blindfolding him, but he heard the groan of the armored panel opening.
On the threshold, with his back to the council, Wilding paused to shake imaginary dust from the tails of his frock coat.
4
MAY 17, 382 AS. 1117 HOURS.
From the deck Brainard looked at the wall of jungle beyond the tide-swept marsh. Vines, branches, and flowers like bright sucking mouths entwined in twisted agony.
There was movement. A stand of slender, black-trunked trees quivered back instead of leaning toward the humans over the salt-resistant reeds.
“What’s happening with them?” said Wheelwright. “The trees.”
That was the question that Brainard was afraid to ask. Brainard didn’t know anything about the situation—except that he was terrified of having to think beyond the immediate next step.
“Morning stars,” said OT Wilding coolly. “Plants can’t normally move as fast as animals, even here, but these store energy by drawing back their trunks like springs. When we come within fifty feet, they’ll snap forward and grab us with the spikes in their branches.”
“The edge of the jungle is worse than anything we’ll find inside it,” Brainard said. “It’s like a warship’s armor. Once we penetrate the shell, we’ll be all right.”
To build and maintain their bases, the Herd and other Free Companies fought a constant war against nature. There had been lectures on surface life-forms during training, but Brainard had pretty much dozed through them.
Active duty hadn’t given him any practical experience, either. Large vessels, dreadnoughts and cruisers, provided the perimeter guards who battled the jungle’s attempts to retake Base Hafner.
The line Brainard parroted was the only thing he remembered from the lectures. The words sounded empty.
Leaf frowned in puzzlement. A scar trailed up the little motorman’s left cheek and into his hair where it continued as a streak of white. “How can we get through that, sir? We got two cutting bars and our knives.”
He wasn’t arguing. He just wanted an explanation of a plan that his mind couldn’t make practicable.
“We can burn it,” said Caffey unexpectedly.
“Go on, Fish,” Brainard said. His face was expressionless; his mind was empty of useful ideas.
“It takes a fuze to make barakite explode,” the torpedoman said. “If you just light a wad of it, it burns like the fires of Hell. And we’ve got a ton of the stuff we can take outa them two.” He thumbed in the direction of the crumpled torpedoes.
Brainard nodded. “Right,” he said. “Caffey and Wheelwright, begin removing the warheads. Newton—no, I’ll guard you myself. Wilding—”
“Sir, we can’t carry much, just the two of us,” Wheelwright blurted.
“Boz and me’ll lift a deck panel,” Leaf volunteered. His boot tapped the ribbed sheets of radar-absorbent plastic which covered the hovercraft’s upper surfaces. “We’ll bend the end up and make a skid. You can dump the stuff on that.”
“Wait,” Brainard said. He thought for a moment. Barakite explosive was a white, doughy substance, as seemingly harmless as so much taffy. He’d seen what happened to a warship when a barakite torpedo exploded in her belly, though.…
“Just take the backplate off one of the warheads,” he said. “The casing’ll direct the flames out, like a flame-thrower.”
“Jeez, we better make sure we unscrew the fuze first!” Wheelwright gasped.
“Yes, you had better,” said OT Wilding with a twist of his lips.
“Wilding,” Brainard continued, “take charge of loading useful items into packs. Weapons, ammunition, food if you think we’ll need it. You’re the environmental expert. Remember that we’ll carry loose barakite from the other warhead. We may need it farther along.” He swallowed. “I’ll take the communicator myself,” he said.
The laser communicator was their one hope of rescue. With that solid security in his hands, Brainard thought he might be able to get through the hours until they reached the peak. Might.
Everybody looked at him. “Caffey, what are you waiting for?” he snapped. “Let’s move!”
The two torpedomen swung immediately to the hovercraft’s rail. Caffey snubbed up at the end of the hose connected to his environmental suit and paused. He looked back at Brainard.
Next problem. One at a time. “Until we’re through the, the frontal wall of the jungle,” Brainard said, “you can wear your suits or not as you choose. After that, they’ll be too heavy and confining. We’ll leave them.”
They all stared at him. The tough suits were armor, real armor against the lethal surface environment, but men wearing them couldn’t carry a load as much as a hundred yards with the air hoses disconnected.
“I’m going to take mine off now,” said Brainard. His body began to obey his mouth, opening the catches and taking the direct shock of heat and saturated humidity. His mind watched the events as if they were taking place on the holonews.
Caffey unclipped his hose and clambered over the rail, followed by his striker. For the grace period Brainard had offered them, the discomfort of a disconnected suit was more bearable than facing the surface unprotected.
Leaf knelt and began cutting the tack welds with his multitool. The motorman directed Bozman as if his assistant were a barely sentient tool himself.
Wilding gave orders in a clear, precise voice, separating into manageable loads the objects that would keep the crew alive during its trek. Everything was under control.
Brainard stepped out of his suit. He felt naked and afraid. He jumped quickly from the deck before he could lose his nerve.
Stupid. He sank to mid-calf in the muck. Wheelwright glanced back. Men were looking at him from deck also.
“Get on with—” Brainard called.
A leech the length of Brainard’s arm rose from the mud. It twisted toward his face. It was green with white stripes the length of its body, and its mouth was a black pit.
Brainard tried to scream but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He thrust out with the rifle in his hands. The creature engulfed the weapon’s muzzle in a hideous sexual parody.
Brainard pulled the trigger and nothing happened, nothing happened! He jerked the rifle upward convulsively. The leech clung for a moment, then slipped off, and writhed through an arc over the marsh. A tube worm shot from its armored housing near the shore and snatched the leech while it was still in the air.
Brainard stared at his rifle. The selector was still on Safe. He rotated it to Automatic and began to drag his legs forward. He was almost blind from fear. He knew that unless he moved at once, he would be unable to move ever again.
“Newton,” ordered Wilding, “I told you to bring the remaining bandoliers from the arms locker. Get moving!”
It was a good thing they had Wilding along. He’d been born to lead. Most officer-trainees were kids who went blind with fear in a crisis.…
JULY 12, 381 AS. 0933 HOURS.
“I’ve brought your new XO, Tonello,” Lieutenant Holman called to
the officer bent over in the cockpit of the hovercraft docked on a shallowly submerged platform.
Holman prodded Officer-Trainee Brainard between the shoulder blades. Brainard, his hard-copy files clutched in his hands, hopped convulsively from the quay to the vessel. The gray deck shivered beneath his sudden weight. The hovercraft was 60 feet long and 28 feet across the beam, but her mass was deceptively slight because most of the volume was the empty plenum chamber.
Lieutenant Tonello straightened with an engaging smile and extended his hand out of the cockpit well. He was a lanky man several inches taller than Brainard’s own five-foot-eleven. “Welcome aboard K67—” his eyes read the name tape sewn over the left breast pocket of Brainard’s utilities “—Brainard. You had three months aboard the Kudu, I believe?”
Tonello’s grip was firm, but he didn’t play finger-crushing games the way Lieutenant Holman had done half an hour earlier. Brainard handed his new CO his file with some embarrassment. “Ah, no sir,” he said. “I’m straight out of training school.”
“That was Officer-Trainee Suchert,” Holman said from the quay. “Suchert, ah, went to K44 instead.”
A score of small craft, both air-cushion and hydrofoils, were moored to either side of the quay. No combat aircraft could survive in the environment created by the beam weapons and railguns mounted on capital ships. High-speed torpedo craft could blend closely enough against the sea to remain effective. They carried out the reconnaissance and light-attack duties which would once have been detailed to aircraft.
It was a dangerous job—but war is risk, and no man is immortal.
A head watched Brainard from K67’s gun tub, and another popped out of a hatch forward that must give access to the plenum chamber. Enlisted members of the hovercraft’s crew were sizing up the new junior officer.
Lieutenant Tonello riffled through Brainard’s file, then glanced up at Holman with a thin smile. “Wanted somebody with experience to hold your brother’s hand, did you, Holman? Well, that’s all right with me. Brainard here’s got two years of technical school behind him. Just the sort a flitterboat needs.”
Holman’s chin lifted. “Ted doesn’t need anybody to hold his hand,” he snapped.
“I didn’t say he did,” Tonello remarked, looking down as if he were going through Brainard’s file more carefully. “I didn’t say it.”
Holman spun on his heel. He strode down the quay to where K44 was moored. The scar-faced man looking from the plenum chamber grinned at Brainard, turned his head, and spit into the oil-rainbowed water of Herd Harbor.
Tonello dropped Brainard’s file on a console and grinned again. “What do you know about hovercraft, Brainard?” he asked.
“Not much, sir,” Brainard said, wishing there were some way he could lie and expect to get away with it. He’d assumed his first assignment would be to a ship whose scores or hundreds of crewmen could cover for his own inexperience. “Just that you’ve got eight-man crews.”
“And two torpedoes, Brainard,” the lieutenant said. He was still smiling, but his lips now had the hard curve of a fighting axe. “Don’t forget those. Because if we do our jobs right, the other side won’t forget them.” Tonello’s expression softened again. “No problem. I’ll give you the grand tour.” He gestured forward. “That’s Yee at the gun tub,” he explained. “If a mission goes perfectly, we’ll get in unobserved and he won’t fire a shot.”
“Fat chance,” remarked one of the men who had risen from the scuttle aft the cockpit.
“If things don’t go perfectly,” Tonello continued in an equable voice, “then nobody likes a faceful of tracer fired from twin seventy-fives. If our problem’s with a boat more or less our size, Yee may well settle matters.”
Tonello turned to indicate the man who had just spoken. “That’s Tech Two Caffey,” he said, “our torpedoman. If I do my job, the fish’ll track to their target by themselves. Caffey and his striker are there in case I’m not perfect. Their station’s got imaging and control along fiber-optics cables, so they can thread the torpedoes through the eye of a needle if they’ve got to.”
“A big fucking needle,” the torpedoman grunted, but he was obviously pleased.
“And that’s Tech Two Leaf,” the lieutenant said, turning toward the scarred fellow looking out of the plenum chamber. “When he’s on duty, he’s the best motorman in the Herd—”
Leaf grinned.
“—and when he’s off duty, he’s my worst discipline problem,” Tonello continued—and the motorman continued to grin. “What are you working on, Leaf?”
“Replacing the impeller on Number One fan, sir,” Leaf said. “I got Newton and Bozman in the water wearing suits, while I tighten fittings.” He waved a multitool. “RHIP.”
“You remember that when you go on leave, Leaf,” Tonello said. “Because the next time you’re caught in a bar fight, you’ll have neither rank nor privileges. I promise.”
Leaf gave a mocking salute with his multitool, then ducked out of sight.
Quietly, so that none of the enlisted men could hear, Tonello said, “We’ve got four fans to float us on a bubble of air and drive us. If one goes out, we can still maneuver, but we’re sluggish and a target for anybody with so much as a popgun.” He nodded forward. “In the eighteen months Leaf has been motorman, K67 has never lost a fan to maintenance problems.” Tonello continued in a normal voice, “Your station’s here, Brainard.” He pointed to the left of the three seats across the cockpit. “In action, your primary responsibilities are navigation and electronic countermeasures, but you may be called on to do any job on the vessel, so you have to know every man’s duties.”
The lieutenant gave his axe-blade smile again. “In particular,” he said, “you may have to command the vessel if something happens to your commanding officer. So stay alert, hey?”
He clasped Brainard’s wrist and gave it a gentle shake for emphasis.
Brainard would have swallowed, but the lump in his throat was too big.
5
MAY 17, 382 AS. 1610 HOURS.
Leaf had known plenty of brave men—
“Keep her moving!” ordered Ensign Brainard, darting quick glances in all directions as he walked ahead of the six-man crew at the draglines. Leaf was the man nearest the skid on the left side. “Don’t lose your momentum!”
—but he’d never met somebody as willing to hang his balls on the wall as Brainard. Don’t waste ammo, he says, so when a leech goes for him, he don’t even bother to shoot it, just swats it away.
“Sir, should I…?” Yee called from behind them, in K67’s gun tub.
Leaf looked up. Sweat blurred his vision, but if those morning stars weren’t within the fifty feet Wilding gave as their trigger range, they were sure damned close to it.
Only thing was, Brainard was out in front.
“Not yet!” the CO said.
They were using safety lines as drag ropes for the skid. Reeds flattened into the slippery ooze, creating a perfectly lubricated surface over which to pull the massive warhead—but the same muck gave piss-poor traction to the boots of the men tugged the skid toward the wall of jungle.
Leaf wheezed and staggered in the discomfort of his heavy suit. It didn’t seem to him that he was pulling his weight, but somebody among the six of them must be doing the job. The skid moved, and the twisted trees were goddam close.
At least they hadn’t had problems with large animals. Leaf had been raised in Block 81 of Wisconsin Keep, a slum; he understood territories. The snake and spider he’d attracted had kept this stretch of marsh to themselves. There hadn’t been enough time since the local bosses got the chop for replacements to take over.
The crew gave the pond itself a wide berth. Whatever lived on its bottom had been given a big enough meal to occupy it for a while, anyhow.
“Mr Brainard?” gasped Wilding, on the far end of Leaf’s rope. “I think—”
Brainard had offered to take a rope and let Wilding control the operation. The officer-traine
e refused, saying he’d be useless as a guard because he couldn’t shoot. Leaf didn’t figure a pansy like Wilding’d do much good on the line, either; but at least he was trying.
“Right,” ordered Brainard. “Everybody down. Yee!”
Leaf flattened. He clapped his hands over his ears and opened his mouth. The man beside him, Newton, was still upright. He either hadn’t heard the order or—more likely with Newton—hadn’t understood it.
Leaf grabbed the butt of the coxswain’s slung rifle and tugged it hard. Wilding must have been pulling from the other side, because Newton flopped down an instant before Yee’s twin seventy-fives cut loose over their heads.
Even fifty feet away, the big guns’ muzzle blasts punished bare skin and stabbed agony through the ear Leaf had uncovered to save Newton. The ballistic crack of the supersonic bullets snapping just overhead was worse for the motorman’s nerves.
These rounds were aimed high deliberately. Too often in Leaf’s small-boat service, a snap!snap!snap! meant the enemy was about to correct his sight picture and put his next burst through your hull.
Ropes of brilliant scarlet tracers raked the edge of the jungle, concentrating as planned on the copse of morning stars. The explosive bullets went off with white flashes against the black bark, hurling bits of wood in all directions.
The explosions released tension within the trunks. Sawed-off boles leaped into the air. Their spiky branches slashed at one another during the moments it took them to fall.
The guns scythed a 10° arc through the living barrier, then stuttered into silence. Yee had shot off the entire contents of his ammo drums. Powder gases, explosive residues, and the thick smoke of green vegetation burning hung in the air. A beetle the size of a cheap apartment stepped into the cut, then rushed away through a path it tore for itself.
“Come on!” Brainard shouted. His voice chimed through the ringing in the motorman’s left ear. “Move! Move! Move!”
Leaf got up. For an instant he thought he was having difficulty because he was exhausted; then he noticed that during the time he hugged the ground, reeds had grown about him. Their tips probed at the folds of the environmental suit. He swore and tore himself free.