by David Drake
He didn’t know what to do. He doubted there was anything they could do, now.
Leaf lay face down, moaning. Brainard reached out with his left hand and lifted the motorman. The bamboo had withered in the intense heat. It no longer clung to flesh and clothing.
“Good thinking,” Brainard said. “With the barakite.”
Must have been Leaf who ignited it, though it wasn’t his pack because he was still carrying that. Caffey … no, Yee had been Number Two. Yee and Wilding were gone, just ahead of the rest of them.
The mat of flame-shrunken stems quivered, then moaned. OT Wilding’s slim, aristocratic hand reached out of it.
“God help us!” blurted Caffey.
There was a swollen line across the torpedoman’s neck, but he was enough himself again to push his way to the head of the column. He shifted the machinegun to his left hand and snatched the cutting bar from where Wilding must have dropped it.
“Not that,” snapped Brainard. “D’ye want to take his leg off?”
He knelt and began to pry the bamboo upward with one hand and the muzzle of his rifle. The laser communicator flopped awkwardly against his knees. With Wilding alive, they had a chance.
The desiccated stems splintered without resistance. Wilding could save them.…
Wilding was able to sit up by himself when they cleared the bamboo from his chest. Fresh growth, protected like the officer-trainee by the insulating mat, left nasty sores where it had begun to suck at his back.
“Is he okay?” Bozman called from the back of the line.
Leaf and the cautiously used blade of his multitool worked Wilding’s boots free.
“He’s all right,” Brainard said. A prayer of exultation danced in his mind as he heard his own flat statement.
“No,” said Wilding. “I’ve sprained my ankle. You’re going to have to leave me.”
Brainard raised his eyes to the terrain ahead of them. It seemed to be a plateau, but they would have more climbing to do shortly.
“Who’s got the first-aid kit?” he demanded. “Get a pressure bandage on the XO’s ankle.”
“You can’t carry a cripple along with you,” Wilding sneered. “Take what you need from my pack and get moving before something worse comes along.”
Awareness that the officer-trainee might be right froze Brainard’s heart. “Shut up,” he snarled.
Wilding’s face went blank. Leaf and Caffey, at the edge of Brainard’s focused vision, stiffened.
Wheelwright said, “I got the kit,” breaking the pulsing silence. “Lemme up to the front.”
Men shifted. There was plenty of room in the broader pathway that the grasshopper had chewed through the jointed tangle. Caffey looked at the cutting bar in his hand and said, “Ah, I’ll cut him a crutch, okay?”
Yee’s rifle lay a few feet away. Brainard picked it up. Shreds of bamboo fiber were stuck to the plastic stock where the barakite had softened it.
“No,” said Wilding. He looked at Caffey, purposefully avoiding eye contact with the ensign. “That won’t work. The bamboo—any surface vegetation. It’ll keep growing after it’s cut, and.…”
He made a negligent gesture toward the sores on his back. Wheelwright coated them with a clear antiseptic, but the edges were already puckering upward.
The scorpion’s pincers had cut the rifle’s beryllium receiver almost in half. There were bright gouges through the barrel’s weatherproofing and into the steel beneath.
“Right,” said Brainard. “We’ll use this for a crutch. It’s not good for much else.” He handed the rifle to Wilding.
Wilding’s tongue touched his lips. He looked at the ensign. “Sir?” he said. “I still can’t march—”
“I’ll help him, sir,” said Leaf.
“The junior personnel will assist Mr Wilding in rotation,” Brainard said as his mind clicked through the minuscule tasks that he could understand, could deal with. “Newton, Bozman, Wheelwright. Thirty-minute watches.”
He’d almost assigned Yee a place in the watch list.
“Leaf, I want you at the end of the column,” he continued. He held out his rifle to the motorman. “Take this. Caffey, give me the cutting bar. I’ll lead, and I want you and the big gun right behind me.”
Leaf turned his head as though he had not seen the proffered weapon. “I don’t want a fucking gun,” he snarled. “Why’n’t you let me help the XO? I can do it.”
“Newton’s carrying the other bar, sir,” Wilding said quietly. “You’d better use it. The charge on this one is almost flat.”
Brainard slung his rifle. “All right,” he said. “Newton, give me the other bar. Wheelwright, take the end slot. Watch yourself. Leaf, help Mr Wilding. Stay close. There’s a lot of this place that I don’t know anything about.”
There was damn-all about this place that he did know anything about.
“Sir,” offered Caffey. “Ah, d’ye want me to carry the communicator? It’ll get in the way if there’s much cutting to do.”
Brainard looked at the torpedoman with a flat expression which he hoped hid the sudden terror in his mind. “We’ll be following the grasshopper’s path,” he said coldly. “I’ll keep the communicator.”
The laser communicator was Brainard’s lifeline. Its hard outlines were all that kept him sane. If he was still sane.…
JULY 23, 381 AS. 0301 HOURS.
The twenty-seven islands on Brainard’s navigation display ranged from mere fangs of rock to a ridged mass rising to a thousand feet, worthy of a name.
Even the narrower perspective of the console’s central situation display was splotched with islands. But the natural surroundings didn’t matter, because a Seatiger warship was edging through a channel between two of the swampy blobs at a charted distance of 5721 yards.
“Ready torpedoes,” Lieutenant Tonello rasped over the interphone. He stood to look over K67’s cockpit coaming, while OT Brainard hid within his holographic environment. “Flank spee—”
A starshell popped. Tracers snarled overhead measurable seconds before Brainard heard the howl of the Gatlings that fired them.
“Torpedoes ready,” Tech 2 Caffey reported. The interphone turned his voice into that of a soloist accompanied by the orchestra of Hell.
“Coxs’n, three degrees starboard.”
K67 accelerated like a kicked can. Water slammed upward so near the port side that water drenched Brainard’s console. The spout was luminous with the orange flames at its heart. The second shell was dead astern, the third astern to starboard.
Tonello had kept the fans on high, spilling air through the waste slots in the plenum chamber, as the torpedo craft nosed through the archipelago to find the targets he knew were present. OT Brainard had cursed the CO in silent terror because that technique made K67 a sonic beacon. Brainard hadn’t been able to help matters at the countermeasures board, though the scattering effect of the islands themselves had turned the two-vessel patrol into a flotilla.
It would have taken the fans 90 seconds to spin up from low-signature mode to full power. It took a half-second to slam the waste slots closed and lurch toward the enemy. That was many times the difference between a waterspout astern—and a fireball which scattered indistinguishable bits of crew and vessel after a 5.5-inch shell detonated K67’s own torpedoes.
Brainard punched up an identification sidebar on his situation display. When his mind and fingers did something, the roar and flashes couldn’t drown him in their terror.
The sea was orange with waterspouts; muzzle flashes boiled the whole horizon red and white. K44 vanished from the display. Even the islands blurred and shrank as the shell-storm degraded the data reaching K67’s sensors.
Brainard’s console told him their opponent was a destroyer-leader with a full-load displacement of 2700 tons and a main armament of six 5.5-inch guns in triple turrets.
He didn’t believe it. He was sure from the volume of fire that they’d jumped a dreadnought. He reached under the panel and switched t
o the back-up system. The holographic display vanished for a hideous fraction of a second, forcing Brainard to see the carnage around him. Light trembling from flares twisted sea creatures on the surface into shapes still more monstrous than those of nature. Horrors fought and feasted at the banquet laid by bursting shells.
Then the back-up circuits took over. The new display told Brainard the same thing the old one had, that K67 faced a minor fleet element, not a dreadnought. Only a destroyer-leader, only a hundred times the hovercraft’s size—
“Launch one!” said Lieutenant Tonello in a voice as clear as glass breaking. K67 shuddered as studs blew open and dropped one of the torpedoes into the sea beneath her plenum chamber.
“Launch two!”
“Tracking!” Caffey reported as he hunched over his guidance controls. The torpedo’s own sensors gave the operator a multispectral view of the target. If the enemy tried to dodge, Caffey could send steering commands along the cable of optical fiber which connected the weapon to the hovercraft.
The release thump of the second torpedo was lost in the burst of explosive bullets that buzz-sawed across K67.
Lieutenant Tonello’s head vanished in a yellow flash. His body hurtled against the back bulkhead. The shatterproof windscreen disintegrated into a dazzle of microscopic beads, and all the cockpit displays went dead. The coxswain screamed and rolled out of his seat. K67 wallowed broadside, still at full power.
Each side-console had an emergency helm and throttle under the middle display. Brainard rotated his unit up and locked it into position. Wind blast through the missing screen hammered him. The destroyer-leader was a Roman candle of muzzle flashes.
A starshell had drifted almost to the surface astern of K67. By its flickering light, Brainard saw another blacked-out hovercraft race across the wave tops toward the target. He hadn’t had time to think about K44 since the shooting started.
Brainard spun his miniature helm hard to starboard. The hovercraft did not respond.
A salvo of 5.5-inch shells straddled K67 with a roar louder than Doomsday. Waterspouts lifted the hovercraft and spilled the air out of her plenum chamber. She slammed the surface again with a bone-jarring crash.
The main circuit breakers had tripped. A battery-powered LED marked the breaker box, but Brainard’s retinas still flickered with afterimages of the explosive bullets that raked the cockpit. He groped for the box, barked his knuckles on the edge of it, and finally got it open while several rounds of automatic fire slapped K67’s skirts.
Brainard snapped the main switch into place. The console displays remained dark, but the hovercraft answered her helm.
The coxswain lay moaning on the deck. “Medic!” Brainard shouted. “Medic!” The interphone wasn’t working either.
The circuit breaker overloaded again with a blue flash. K67’s fans continued to drive her, but the shell-frothed waves wrenched the vessel into a curve that would end on a rocky islet unless the Seatigers destroyed her first.
Brainard grabbed the circuit breaker with his left hand. He snapped the switch home and held it there. Sparks trembled and his forearm went numb. An overloaded component blew in the coxswain’s station, but Brainard had control again.
He overcorrected. K67 reversed her curve as though Brainard intended a figure-8. A three-shell salvo ignited the sea along the hovercraft’s previous course.
“Medic!” Brainard cried. He had no feeling on the left side of his body. His left foot thrashed a crazy jig against the cockpit bulkheads.
The sky behind them turned orange.
Brainard looked over his shoulder. Where the destroyer-leader had been, a bubble of light with sharp edges lifted five hundred feet above the horizon. Stark shadows ripped across the neighboring islands as a doughnut-shaped shock-wave pushed trees away from the light.
It must have been the target’s own munitions, because no torpedo warhead could wreak such destruction.
The destroyer-leader was almost two miles away. The blast made K67 skip like a flung pebble.
Leaf crawled into the cockpit, carrying the first-aid kit. He wore gloves.
“Forget that!” Brainard squealed as the motorman crouched over the writhing coxswain. “Hold this breaker closed!”
K67 spewed air through dozens of holes in her skirts, but she would survive until a tender could take her aboard. K67’s torpedoes had lost guidance when the system power failed, but her consort had driven in and nailed the Seatiger vessel.
Because of K44, Officer-Trainee Brainard was going to survive this night after all.
10
MAY 17, 382 AS. 2148 HOURS.
Leaf heard OT Wilding say, “That’s rock, we stop here,” as they struggled past a tangle of thorny, interlacing vines.
The words didn’t matter to Leaf. Wilding’d been muttering nonsense for … a long time, a lot of stumbling steps whatever the clock time might have been. The last time Wheelwright had dressed the bamboo sores on the officer’s back, they’d had scarlet edges and centers of yellow pus.
But they weren’t any of them in shape for a dress parade. Leaf saw only blurs because of the sweat in his eyes. He didn’t have the energy to wipe his face with his right cuff. The multitool filled Leaf’s right hand, and his left arm helped support Wilding …
Who was handsome, and rich, and not a pussy after all. During bouts of fever, the officer-trainee couldn’t control his tongue—but he kept his feet moving forward. Their route was mostly uphill and the rifle made a bad crutch, but Wilding didn’t flop down and die the way Leaf had maybe expected.
Wilding shook himself out of the motorman’s grasp. Swaying like a top about to fall over, Wilding said, “We stop here,” in a voice well accustomed to giving orders.
Leaf realized he was ready to fall down himself. Fuckin’ A. He rubbed his right eyesocket a little clearer on the point of his shoulder. “Fish!” he shouted to the torpedoman’s back. “Get the CO. Mr Wilding wants a word.”
And a hell of a bad place to stop for one, but you didn’t argue with officers.
They were in a belt of thirty-foot-tall grass which defended its territory against encroaching woody plants by sawing off their stems with glassy nodules along the edges of the narrow grassblades. The competition was as dynamic as that of surf and the shoreline.
Even now in the momentary pause, glitteringly serrated blades twisted close to treat the humans with the same mindless ferocity that would greet an oak or mahogany. All that could be said in favor of going through the grass was that it was possible to cut the stuff. The tangle of thorns to the side was impassable.
Ensign Brainard stepped back from the head of the path he had cleared. His face and hands were smeared with a slick of his own sweat-diluted blood. “What is it?” he asked calmly.
Wilding opened his mouth. He swayed. Leaf reached over to catch him, but the officer-trainee crossed both palms firmly on the butt of his crutch to steady himself.
“That’s rock,” Wilding said. “Where the berry bush is growing.” He flicked his eyes sideways because he was afraid that he would topple if he so much as nodded his head. “We could rest there. A real rest.”
Leaf looked at the tangle. The brambles were woven like a fishnet. Hundreds of small white flowers bloomed among the black stems and foliage, but nothing bigger than a man’s arm could penetrate the mass.
A large insect might trust to its armor while browsing on the vines and later berries, but Leaf already had enough experience with surface life to imagine the results. The brambles gave only until the animal was fully within their mass. Then—
Just like a fishnet. A thorn-studded fishnet.
The CO looked at the tangle without expression. “We’ll go on,” he said flatly. “I can’t cut that.”
“Hey!” said Caffey. “We can blow it clear! With the barakite.”
“No,” said Wilding. “We’ll use the barakite to burn it. We don’t want to pulverize the rock.”
Brainard looked from Wilding to Leaf. “All righ
t,” he said. “Leaf, you’ll lay the charges. All right?”
Leaf nodded. “Yessir.”
He shrugged to slide the pack straps off his shoulders. At first his muscles wouldn’t respond; then the load slipped abruptly. The straps scraped his arms, and the pack itself bruised the backs of his thighs.
“We’ll use portions of the barakite from everybody’s pack,” the ensign continued. “And don’t let any ignite that you don’t mean to burn.”
“Yessir,” Leaf muttered. He knelt to begin work.
Brainard turned and cut at the grass rustling lethally closer to the human interlopers. Leaf saw that the CO had difficulty raising the cutting bar enough to use it.
Leaf rolled a ball of explosive between his palms, forming it into a coarse thread. The barakite was tacky in the moist heat, but the plasticizing additive retained its tensile strength so that Leaf could create a creamy white strand as thin as his little finger before the material broke under its own weight.
Caffey began forming a thread of his own when he saw what the motorman was doing. At Brainard’s order, the other enlisted men passed blobs of barakite to the chiefs. They were probably glad to be rid of a few pounds of their burdens.…
When he had six strands of explosive, each a yard and a half long, the motorman paused. “Okay, that’ll do,” he muttered to his hands.
Caffey held out a canteen. “Have some water first,” he said.
Leaf was too exhausted to argue with any suggestion. “Yeah, sure,” he said. He reached for his own canteen.
Water was no problem. The condensing jacket on each crewman’s canteen would fill the quart flask within ten minutes in this saturated atmosphere.
“Naw,” said the torpedoman. “Use mine.”
Leaf took the canteen and drank deeply. His eyes flashed open.
For the first time he noticed that the torpedoman carried two canteens. This one was full of rum.
Caffey grinned. “Essential to life,” he said.
“You bet,” said Leaf. “Now, everybody keep the hell back.”
The brambles trembled softly toward him. He thought for a moment, then said, “Sir, lemme borrow the rifle, okay?”