by David Drake
Caffey saw the motion. “Watch it!” he shouted. He triggered a burst, firing his machine gun from the hip. Bullets plowed the fire-hardened soil. The muzzle blasts made the foliage quiver as if with anticipation.
“Cease fire!” Brainard shouted. They were never going to make it. “Cease fire!”
Clear, poisonous sap filled and sealed the nip one bullet had taken from a tendril. The tip resumed its rotary advance.
“We’ll need that ammo,” Brainard muttered to himself.
He glanced up into the canopy to avoid meeting Caffey’s eyes. Strands of cobweb drifted there. He hadn’t seen it when he looked a moment—
The cobweb was drifting down on them. It was a circular blanket ten feet in diameter, as insubstantial as smoke.
“Move!” Brainard shouted. “Run! Run!”
Wilding glanced upward. “This way!” he cried, leading the way deeper into the jungle.
The crew stampeded forward. Bozman dropped his pack. The cobweb banked lazily around the bole of a forest giant and followed. The humans were hindered by grasping foliage, but the blanket moved in open air beneath the mid-canopy. It easily followed its prey.
Brainard stood transfixed. He didn’t know what to do. He opened his mouth to call his men back, but Wilding knew about the dangers, and anyway it was too late.
Brainard should—
Brainard should—
He raised his rifle and fired at the creature a hundred feet in the air. He was a good shot. The yellow muzzle flashes hid the cobweb for an instant, but there was a spark of light as a bullet hit something.
He fired again, another short burst, and the creature curved toward him with the grace of a shark moving in for the kill. Fifty feet, thirty. It gleamed like a diffraction grating as a beam of direct sunlight caught it.
Brainard didn’t realize his finger had clamped down on the trigger until the rifle butt abruptly ceased to recoil against his shoulder. He threw down the empty weapon and ran for the nearest cover, the burned-off stump of a fern that had been three hundred feet tall.
The cobweb swooped. The edges of gossamer fabric extended like the wings of a bat driving food to the waiting jaws. Brainard saw the glitter in the corners of both his eyes. The stump was too far to—
An ivy tendril caught him. He tripped forward on his face. He flung his hands out, just short of the stump he had hoped would shelter him.
The creature swept over him as a shimmering shadow. It wrapped itself around the stump.
Brainard stared. The crystal fabric humped itself, driving spikes a foot long into the smoldering wood. The holes released spurts of steam which hung for a moment in the saturated atmosphere.
Wilding ran over to him. “You saved us, sir!” he cried. “That was brilliant! You saved us all!”
Brainard gaped at Wilding. He moved his foot in a disconnected attempt at removing it from the ivy’s hooked grasp.
JULY 23, 381 AS. 0244 HOURS.
Officer-Trainee Brainard’s console was a holographic triptych.
To the right, between Brainard and Watkins, K67’s coxswain, the navigation board displayed the Gehenna Archipelago. Tonello’s hovercraft and her consort, K44, probed for the Seatiger squadron which Cinc Wysocki believed was lurking there in ambush. Low islands and shallow straits scrolled down the panel of coherent light.
Brainard bent close to the left-hand panel which displayed schematics of the torpedo craft’s signatures:
Thermal—
Fan #3’s intake glowed 4° above ambient. Brainard touched keys to reroute the overdeck airflow, scattering the warmth in turbulence. Leaf, hunched against the wind, ran toward the drive module to work on the underlying problem.
Electro-optical—
All the hovercraft’s emitters were shut down. The blotched gray polymer of K67’s hull quivered at between an 83% and 95% match for the surrounding sea in color and albedo. That was a closer copy than stretches of seawater a mile apart could achieve.
The vessel’s computer fed low-voltage current through connections to the hull and skirts, modifying the camouflage pattern by the plastic’s response to its electrical charge. It didn’t require operator input.
Audio—
K67’s sonic signature required an act of God to do it any good. There was damn-all Brainard could even attempt now that the CO had called for flank speed. Intake baffles flattened to smooth the path of air howling to feed the fans. Wind rush—over the deck, the gun tub, the cockpit and the crew stations—blended its myriad turbulences into the roar. Exhaust flow, ducted at high velocity to drive the vessel forward, hammered the night.
You couldn’t have speed and silence. The best you could do was diffuse the cacophony so that it might come from anywhere in a mile radius instead of giving the enemy a sharp aiming point.
Brainard was doing what he could with the low on-deck air dams. He thought he’d shifted the calculated center of noise starboard and 3° astern, though the sonic ghost-vessel would keep a parallel course. Maybe the line of swampy islands a mile to starboard on the navigation screen would produce a confusing echo, but that was a matter for luck—temperature and air currents, nothing that a hovercraft’s electronic countermeasures operator could do.
But something had to be done. Cinc Wysocki had been right. Brainard’s center screen showed that the Seatigers had at least a pair of heavily-armed hydrofoil gunboats in the archipelago, five miles away and closing on the Herd patrol at 42° off the port bow.
Brainard heard the boonk! over the wind roar, but he didn’t recognize the sound until the high-altitude pop followed three seconds later and the heavens turned lambent white in the glare of a star shell. The gunboats opened fire.
K44’s gun tub fired back.
Brainard was lost in the virtual environment of his console. Nothing was real, not even the coxswain and Lieutenant Tonello beside him in the narrow cockpit. K44’s signature brightened by ten orders of magnitude near the center of the situation display.
“Don’t shoot!” Brainard screamed in horror. “For God’s sake, don’t!”
Outside the cockpit, the Seatiger gunboats disappeared behind the dazzle of their tracers and muzzle flashes. Each hydrofoil mounted a 3-inch gun in the bow and 1-inch Gatlings in tubs abaft the cockpit to either side. On the gunboats’ present closing course, all their weapons could fire.
K44’s tracers mounted in a high arc as the gunner attempted to achieve an impossible range. The scarlet marker compound burned out before the bullets started their vain downward tumble.
“Tonello to crew,” rasped the CO’s voice, distorted by static on the interphone’s masking circuit. “Do not fire. Yee, I’ve locked the gun tub. Do not attempt to fire. Break. Blue Leader to—”
Brainard screamed silently as a pip glowed on the signature display. It was all right, tight-beam laser directed at K44 as Tonello gave orders to their consort, but nothing was all right.
“—Blue Two, cease fire and—”
K67 staggered. There was a bang and a puff of hot gas at the port bow on Brainard’s thermal schematic. The CO had fired a decoy from the spigot mortar there.
“—conform to my movements. Out.”
The sky ripped and roared. White streaks quivered like heat lightning in Brainard’s peripheral vision. A sheet of spray lifted just ahead of the hovercraft, better shielding than anything the console provided, but the whack/whack from low in the hull added noise drumming through a double hole in the plenum chamber.
The decoy bloomed into a satisfying blob on Brainard’s situation display, but centrifugal force shoved him to the left and the ghost image he had created on the audio schematic vanished in the modified airstream. Watkin’s elbow blurred the navigation display for a moment as the coxswain fought to hold K67 in a tight starboard turn.
Brainard braced himself and began reworking their sonic signature. The CO was headed for the strait separating a pair of islands like pearls on a necklace. The hovercraft of the Herd patrol had thirty knots
on their hydrofoil opponents, but Tonello was determined to hunt the narrow confines of the archipelago rather than return to Cinc Wysocki with word of a pair of screening vessels.
A triple crackling noise vibrated K67. Brainard’s left-hand display vanished, then resumed before the curse reached his lips and his finger could stab the back-up control.
The islands would blur the hovercraft’s horrifying racket. Maneuvering in tight waters was the CO’s concern, not Brainard’s.
Brainard had to concentrate on eliminating the torpedo-craft’s signatures.
Or he would die.
The night to the left exploded in hard white flashes. A gunboat had slammed its six-round burst into a skerry as K67 roared past. Fragments of rock, shell-casing, and barnacles three feet in diameter sprang into the air. They rained down on the hovercraft’s deck. Shreds of barnacle flesh gave the air a fishy tinge and brought shoals of toothed creatures to the surface.
The firing was behind them. A series of low islands concealed the gunboats from K67’s sensors. K44 had managed to join her leader, but hot spots on Brainard’s situation display indicated the other hovercraft had battle damage.
“Tonello to crew!” the CO crackled over the interphone. “The Seatigers may think this is a great place to hide, but we’ll see how well they dodge torpedoes in narrow waters!”
Something touched Brainard’s shoulder. He turned around in shock. Tonello had loosened his harness in order to lean over to the countermeasures console.
The CO raised his visor and shouted over the wind rush, “Brainard, I’ve never known a man to stay so cool in his first action. I’m proud to have you aboard!”
Tonello swung back into his own seat.
Brainard stared at him. The CO’s words had been distinct, but they didn’t make any sense.
Wind buffeted Brainard at chest height. He shut down the signature display for a moment. There was a circular one-inch hole in the plastic behind the holographic panel.
Brainard wondered dully how the Gatling bullet had managed to miss him on the continuation of its course.
7
MAY 17, 382 AS. 1634 HOURS.
Wilding offered Brainard a hand. Brainard stared as if he were unable to comprehend the gesture.
The enlisted members of the crew ran back to their officers. Leaf picked up Brainard’s rifle by the sling and demanded, “What was that? What the hell was that?”
“Goddam if I know,” the ensign said in an emotionless voice. He levered himself to his knees, then stood upright. His bandolier swayed, making the magazines clatter against one another.
Wilding rubbed his hand on his thigh to give it something to do. “It’s an ice mat,” he said, looking at the crystalline form. Pale, stunted shoots sprang from nodes over the spikes driven into the tree. “A seed pod of sorts. It’s descended from a thistle—the parent plant is, I mean.”
Brainard took his rifle from Leaf. He touched the barrel; winced as the hot metal burned him. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”
Wilding had forgotten the weight of his pack during the moments of panic. Now the straps cut into his shoulders. He was suddenly sure that the forty-pound loads which he had set—conservatively, he thought—were too heavy, at least for him.
“Yes, sir,” he said as he strode back into the jungle.
The edges of the cleared area were already a tangle of thorns and poison. Wilding reopened the path with the powered cutting bar he carried, one of the two in K67’s equipment locker before the crash. Caffey fell in behind him with the machine-gun.
“But it was alive,” Leaf insisted from midway back in the line. “It wasn’t just falling, it was coming for us.”
“It doesn’t have a mind,” Wilding said. He knew he should concentrate on the terrain in front of him, but a part of him insisted that he dwell on Ensign Brainard’s cold courage. “It has a very discriminating infra-red sensor, though. It would have avoided an open flame, but the CO lured it into a charred stump that had cooled to just above blood heat.”
That was the second part of what Brainard had done. First, while Wilding ran in terror thinking, Let it take one of the others, the CO had used the hot, expanding propellant gases of his rifle to draw the ice mat toward himself. Brainard’s combination of nerve and diamond-hard calculation was almost beyond conception.
The interphone only worked through K67’s computer, but the visor-display compasses in the helmets were self-powered. Wilding set his on a vector to the peak. He began to follow it.
Almost immediately, the terrain lurched up in an outcrop too steep for the thin soil to cling to its surface. Wilding gripped rock, lifted himself, and kicked for a foothold from which he could push up the rest of the way.
A gigantic fig overhung the outcrop. The lower twenty feet of its folded bark bubbled with bright red spittle. A colony of scale insects hid within the frothy protection.
“Don’t touch the red!” Wilding shouted. “Anything that showy is probably poisonous.”
“Give me a hand,” Caffey said peremptorily. “Sir.” He lifted his machine-gun.
Wilding grasped it by the barrel. He almost overbalanced. The gun weighed nearly thirty pounds with its ammunition drum.
The torpedoman clambered up the rock and took the weapon back. He bent to offer Yee, the third man in line, a hand.
A stand of yellow-barked willows was in the direct path. Wilding skirted them. There was a broad corridor through the copse, but bones and the sections of insect exoskeleton there showed its danger.
Trees at the front and back of the corridor wove closed when a large creature stepped within. The boles in the middle of the track squeezed down slowly and crushed their victim into a nitrate supplement for the poor soil.
“Okay,” said Caffey, “that’s how.” The torpedoman panted softly, like a dog, between phrases. “About the ice mat, I mean. But how come? Or does it just like to kill things?”
“Like you, do you mean?” Leaf gibed from behind them.
“Hell, like us, if you want to be that way,” said Caffey. “Like anybody in a Free Company.”
“Not me, Fish,” Leaf replied. “I just—” the motorman paused to grunt his way over a steep patch “—keep the fans spinning.”
Wilding’s whole body hurt. He swung the cutting bar mechanically because it had become too much mental effort to decide when a sweep of the blade was necessary.
“The ice mat needs nutrients to grow,” he said.
He spoke aloud, but he wasn’t sure that his words were distinct enough for the torpedoman to understand. “Animals are the best source of complex nutriments,” he continued. “Insects, reptiles, it doesn’t matter. Any animal has to be able to modify its body temperature against the ambient to function, so that’s what the seed, the ice mat, homes on.”
The lecture took Wilding’s mind off the pain of moving; but the pain was still there, waiting for him.
The moss hanging from branches a hundred feet in the air was so thick that its shade had cleared the ground beneath to sandy red clay. Wilding altered course slightly from the compass vector to take advantage of the open area.
Through interstices in the trunks of moss-hung trees, Wilding glimpsed a steep terrace covered with bamboo. That was going to be a problem. They would either have to go around the tough, jointed grass or cut through it. Given that the belt might encircle the peak—and might be hundreds of feet deep—neither alternative was a good one. Perhaps—
Caffey and Yee both shouted. Caffey’s voice choked off in mid-bleat.
Wilding spun around. The weight of his pack threw him off-balance. A strand of moss had spooled down and wrapped around the torpedoman’s neck. Other strands bobbed just beneath the main mass on the branch, preparing to follow.
The tendril trying to strangle Caffey had snagged the barrel of his machine-gun as well. The gun muzzle crushed painfully against the torpedoman’s forehead, but the rigid steel had saved his larynx.
Yee fired two de
afening shots, trying vainly to blast the gray streamer apart. The moss parted like tissue paper when Wilding swiped his cutting bar through it.
Released tension lifted the severed strand fifty feet in the air. The tip continued to contract around its victim. Wilding and Yee tugged against the moss with their free hands. The cutting bar was too clumsy to use near Caffey’s throat.
The short blade of Leaf’s multitool snicked through the loop of moss. Half came away in Wilding’s hand. The remainder uncoiled and dropped to the ground.
“Fish!” Leaf shouted. “Fish! You okay?”
The torpedoman sat down heavily. His eyes were unfocused. There was a line of red spots across his throat.
Wilding looked down at his own hands. Miniature thorns in the moss had pricked him also. He hoped the points weren’t poisonous, though the inevitable infection would be bad enough.
Overhead—
“Do you need help?” Brainard demanded from the end of the line.
“Come on!” Wilding snarled, grabbing Caffey by one shoulder. “Help him! Moye!”
Yee took Caffey’s other arm. They pounded through the deadly clearing together. The torpedoman was barely able to keep his legs moving in time with those of the men supporting him, but for the moment Wilding forgot about weight and pain. Leaf, the machine-gun’s sling in one hand and his multitool in the other, was on their heels.
When he reached the bamboo, Wilding looked back over his shoulder. The whole crew followed at a staggering run. There were no further problems. The moss reacted too slowly to be a serious threat to men who were prepared for it.
Wilding gasped for breath. A clearing meant danger. It was his fault. He’d been too tired to realize the obvious, and it cost—
“Caffey, how do you feel?” Ensign Brainard demanded before Wilding could remember to ask.
The torpedoman massaged his throat. “I’m okay,” he wheezed. “Just gimme a minute, okay?”