by David Drake
“Ah, sir,” said Caffey. “It’s just, you know, a little party.”
The lieutenant-commander’s face went red, then white. He stared at the name tape on Caffey’s tunic. “Well,” he said in a voice of dangerous calm, “we’ll just see about that.”
Congreve pushed open the door of the billet and said, “All right, stand at—”
The scream and the whine of the cutting bar played a descant to the rumbling bass line from the recorder.
Leaf pulled the door closed. “Let’s get the fuck outa here,” he said.
14
MAY 18, 382 AS. 0622 HOURS.
Filters of cyan, magenta, and yellow shifted across Wilding’s vision with every beat of his heart. After hundreds of repetitions, the colors locked suddenly into a polychrome whole. The officer-trainee watched Ensign Brainard take a grenade out of his tunic pocket.
A pair of grenades had turned up when Wilding searched K67’s ammunition locker. Nobody’d remembered why they were aboard. Maybe to discourage sea life, maybe because somebody had had the notion they’d be useful if the hovercraft’s crew had to board another vessel—a vanishingly improbable event.
But the survivors needed them now.
Brainard grimaced, tossing the grenade an inch or two on his palm to judge its heft. He stepped toward the giant cedar. Caffey and Leaf fell in beside him. They were trying to look in all directions at once.
“I said, ‘Get to cover,’” the ensign ordered harshly.
The torpedoman opened his mouth to protest.
“I’ll have five seconds after I pull this,” Brainard said. His finger tapped the grenade’s safety pin. “I don’t intend to spend it tripping over you two. Get to cover.”
“Yessir,” said Leaf. He touched the back of Caffey’s hand on the machine-gun grip. Both noncoms shuffled past the roots of the fallen log in whose shelter the remainder of the crew waited.
Brainard disappeared into the sucking undergrowth.
K67’s commanding officer was the only reason most of the hovercraft’s crew was still alive. Brainard’s absolute courage—and his coldly reasoned certainty when anyone else would have been in a blind panic—kept them all going.
“Jeez, I hope this works,” Wheelwright muttered.
His hands squeezed the grip and fore-end of his rifle so fiercely that his knuckles were blotched. A grub poked its three-inch head through the bark of the fallen tree and rotated toward the young sailor. “I want to get outa here so bad.”
Barakite was extremely stable under most conditions. A bullet impact would only splash a crater in the doughy explosive. Flame would ignite it; but a fire, although intense, would not topple the giant cypress.
To do that, they needed to detonate the barakite—and K67 hadn’t carried blasting caps. A grenade placed directly against the explosive might provide the necessary combination of heat and shock to set off the daisy-chain.
The part of Wilding’s mind which was not dissociated by pain and fever prayed that it would.
Caffey crushed the grub with the butt of his machine-gun as he slid in beside his striker. “Hell, we got this far, didn’t we?” he said. “Now we just sit for an hour or two and let somebody else do all the work.”
The log had been the trunk of an ebony ten feet in diameter—a large tree by any standards short of those which included the dominant cypress. Branches of the ebony and cypress had battled for sunlight. Slowly but inexorably, the cypress had levered its rival sideways. Finally, aided by a squall, the giant had ripped the ebony’s roots from the soil and toppled it in splendid ruin.
The dense log was fresh enough to cover the humans as they avenged the ebony’s murder.
“Fire in the hole!” Brainard shouted. Foliage muffled his voice and the crashing progress of his run for cover.
Wilding drifted again through pallid filters. Images of Brainard with the grenade merged with his memories of the Board of Review. Then Brainard was an officer-trainee like Wilding, younger by a few years and with only a few more months of service in the Herd.
Wilding watched in awe. Brainard never boasted, never grew defensive. He answered questions with such simple precision that it was only in the words of his crewmen that Brainard’s icy heroism became apparent.
Wilding had never met a man like that in twenty-five years of living as a prince in Wyoming Keep. As clearly as an epiphany, Wilding knew that he must beg or bribe his way into the executive officer slot aboard Brainard’s vessel. That way even Prince Hal might be able to learn the traits of manhood.…
A flatworm, mottled and a yard long, rose from the leaf mold as Brainard dodged past the ebony’s root ball. The worm fastened momentarily to the laser communicator strapped to the ensign’s chest.
Leaf shouted in fury. Brainard crushed the creature against him with a swipe of his rifle butt. It fell writhing. Brainard flung himself down beside the others.
White light flashed across the underside of the leaves. An instant later, the sharp crash of the explosion shocked the jungle to silence.
“Thank God…” Caffey murmured.
The blast was over in the split second of a lightning bolt. The following roar seemed to take forever. Over a hundred thousand tons of wood toppled down the island’s north slope, carrying all before it.
“Yippee!” cried Newton. He jumped to his feet. Brainard grabbed the coxswain’s belt. Newton was too strong for one man to bring down, but Brainard clung for a moment until Leaf and Caffey added their weight.
Newton slammed to the ground with a curse. Dirt, rocks, and chunks of vegetation kicked skyward by the explosion broke like a storm over the humans.
The sudden destruction drove the jungle berserk. Images printed across Wilding’s fever in a surreal montage:
A phalanx of three-yard-long katydids crashed through the undergrowth. The flightless insects ran on four legs and scraped the middle pair deafeningly against their modified wing cases.
Caustic green liquid slurped from the hollow core of a cottonwood, then siphoned back into its hiding place. It left smoldering scars across the bark as it withdrew.
A thirty-foot serpent with eyes like fire opals plunged from high in the canopy. As the snake fell, it twisted to strike repeatedly at its own red-banded body.
A hundred other tragedies glimpsed simultaneously. Thousands more hidden in the massive chaos.
The rain of debris pattered to a halt. The noise of the falling tree continued. Ensign Brainard got to his feet and shambled forward. The able-bodied members of the crew followed … and Officer-Trainee Wilding rose as well.
The pain in his ankle no longer registered. Wilding drifted on a cloud as pink as sunset. When he rounded the roots of the fallen ebony, the air was thick with the odors of barakite and pulverized dirt.
The explosion had not been enough to destroy the gigantic cypress, but it had caused the tree to destroy itself. Despite its thick trunk, the cypress was as carefully poised as a skyscraper. The blast shattered the support structures on one side while giving the enormous mass a violent shove in the opposite direction.
Gravity did the rest. When the cypress overbalanced, it ripped out the remainder of its roots and slid two thousand feet down an angle-of-repose slope into the bay beneath. The air above the track was gray with dust, pulverized life, and creatures leaping and swooping to gain advantage in the sudden no-man’s-land.
The water boiled where cypress branches thrust into the shallows. Sea life was quick to accept the bounty which chance had thrust into its jaws.
“Move,” Wilding whispered. “Move.…”
Every time Wilding’s right foot touched the ground, the world became sepia-toned. Full color returned when he took his weight on his left leg and the makeshift crutch. Still he felt no pain.
The cypress, like most trees growing in thin jungle soils, had wrapped its roots across the surface instead of driving them deep into rock that was bare of nourishment. Even so, the giant took a great bite of ridge line along when it
fell. Boulders shook free of the roots which gripped them and bounded in separate arcs through the jungle. The crew of K67 skirted the left side of the crater.
“Hey!” somebody cried. Wilding heard the crewmen’s voices shifted up several octaves, by fever or by the ear-punishing blast. “There’s a boat down there!”
At first glance, Wilding’s heart leaped with hope that gilded what he saw. He shifted the magnifying function of his helmet visor to x20 and looked again.
It was still a boat, a hovercraft. But there was no hope at all.
The vessel was beached—almost beached—several hundred feet west of the seething ruin which the cypress had torn to the bay. It rode very low. Its skirts had grounded where the water off the shelving beach was still three feet deep, and the crew had been unable or unwilling to bring their craft ashore.
Instead, the shore had come to them.
Honeysuckle ruled the low ground behind the belt of salt-drenched sand on this side of the island. The foliage moved softly, turning toward the opportunity provided by the cypress’s clearing operation. A bridge of vines was arched across the sand to the hovercraft.
The vessel appeared undamaged to the naked eye. Magnification showed that honeysuckle covered all the plastic surfaces in a thin mat. The leaves were brown and shrunken. The colonizing vine had become dormant while it awaited further sustenance.
“Sir, did they come for us?” squealed a foolish, hopeful voice. “Are they going to pick us up?”
Dust settled along the track of the cypress. The flailing roots had dragged torn-up material along, depositing it in a series of clumps and valleys like an oscilloscope pattern. Because the slope still vibrated with the tree’s impact, the mounds continued to settle.
Something moved near the bottom of the track. It was big enough to be a shifting mass of vegetation, but it was coming uphill.
“Caffey, set up a tight perimeter,” squeaked Ensign Brainard. “We’re in the open here, and that’s not entirely good. Leaf—”
Wilding stepped closer to the edge. His helmet enhanced as well as magnifying the image. Mimosa fronds waved in the middle of the slope, but Wilding could not see what was beyond them.
No herbivore was likely to be racing to inspect the site of an explosion.
The ridge dropped sharply for a hundred feet, then splayed outward in a marshy knob where water seeped through a fold in rock layers. The cypress had hung there for a moment. When it continued its long slide to the sea, the tree had scraped the knob to mud.
Two hundred feet below the smear of flattened marsh, a pile of broken alders shuddered. A forked, black-and-yellow tongue, as long as a man was high, flicked over the wrack to sample the air.
“Get back!” Wilding screamed. His own voice was only the upper sideband of human speech. “Run! Something’s coming!”
The head of a monitor lizard, the dominant land predator of the planet, twisted over the alders. The pile of debris scattered beneath the monster’s eight-ton weight. Its tongue continued to slip in and out like light quivering over a swordblade.
Wilding stared into the lizard’s magnified jaws. The cone-shaped teeth were six inches long, and the yellow gullet was large enough to swallow a man whole.
“Get back!” he screamed, but this time he was speaking to himself. The soil gave way beneath his left foot; his right held for a moment. When his right ankle buckled, the officer-trainee began to float effortlessly, through the air—
Down toward the fifty-foot lizard.
JULY 23, 381 AS. 0344 HOURS.
Officer-Trainee Wilding heard the shells howl.
The sound was more penetrating than the crash of the Mouflon’s main batteries or even the drumming bass note of 1-inch Gatlings trying to claw the incoming out of the air before it hit the cruiser.
He looked up from his console, trying instinctively to see through the armored ceiling. His mouth was open.
Two Seatiger shells burst in the storm of fire from the automatic weapons. The other four slammed into the Mouflon’s bridge and forward hull.
There was a green flash. All the lights went out. Wilding felt his buttocks lift from his chair. He had no sense of direction. The air smelled burned, and the shock waves of the blast were so severe that he felt them as pressure, not as noise.
Wilding hit his chair again. The emergency lights went on, yellow strips set into the deck and ceiling moldings. Wilding’s console hummed and flickered as it re-created the display after the power interrupt.
Blue tungsten-sulphide letters on the margin of the display switched from BACK-UP to PRIMARY.
The regular gunnery officer, a senior lieutenant, sprawled at the console beside Wilding’s. His face wore a surprised expression. One of the shell impacts had flexed the armored ceiling enough to spall fragments across the bridge. A saucer-sized disk had whacked through the lieutenant’s neck, then sawed his workstation into sparkling ruin.
Wilding was now gunnery officer for the Mouflon’s starboard automatic weapons, though computers would fire the weapons unless Wilding chose to override their electronic decisions.
The Mouflon rippled off a salvo from her twelve 8-inch guns. Her hull twisted like a snake from the recoil stresses.
Captain Glenn got to his feet. His left shoulder was bleeding. His good hand pawed aimlessly.
Glenn’s eyes focused. He looked down at the deck, picked up his commo helmet, and slapped it back in place over his short-cropped hair. “Damage report,” he ordered harshly.
“Hull nominal,” said Collor, the Mouflon’s executive officer. “Main battery nominal. Fires in three forward compartments, controllable at present.” Collor looked up from his holographic display. In the same dry voice as before, he concluded, “Thirty percent damage to bridge command-and-control installations, but back-up systems are in place.”
Shock had unbonded a ten-foot swath of sound-deadening foam from the ceiling. Damage-control personnel sawed at the fallen blanket to get it out of the way.
The foam was dense and twelve inches thick. It was supposed to be able to trap spalled fragments. It hadn’t done its job well enough for Wilding’s immediate superior.…
The Mouflon writhed with another outgoing salvo. Burning propellant expanded the gun breeches; they rang like huge bells.
Wilding’s console indicated that no further Seatiger shells were in the air. The Gatlings were silent for want of targets.
Wilding’s mouth was dry. He made an effort of will to close it. For a moment, he couldn’t remember why he sat so rigidly in his chair. He was afraid that if he tried to move, his head would slip from his shoulders and bounce to the console, the way the lieutenant’s had done.…
“Sir,” said the lieutenant-commander in charge of communications. He reached over with the sheet of hard copy which his console had just run off.
Captain Glenn bent to take the flimsy. “Wait!” chirped the medic cutting away the back of Glenn’s jacket. Glenn shouted a curse, reacting to the pain of the forgotten wound rather than the medic’s order.
“First bloody time I wore this uniform,” Glenn muttered as he snatched the print-out with his right hand. “First bloody time.”
The eight-inch guns salvoed again. Each tube fired a half-second behind its predecessor. The firing sequence spaced the shockwaves and avoided a simultaneous recoil which would do more damage to the Mouflon than an enemy shell.
Wilding’s mind rang with the scream the lieutenant had died too quickly to utter.
“Right,” said Glenn. He keyed his commo helmet with his right hand, still holding the scrap of hard copy. “Cease fire,” he ordered. His voice boomed from the bridge tannoy and echoed through every compartment of the cruiser.
“All Root elements,” the captain continued. “Change course to one-one-two degrees and proceed at flank speed.”
Wilding was fifteen feet away from the communications console. The red tinge of the characters flickering there indicated the Mouflon was now broadcasting to all the scre
ening vessels—code-name Root.
Glenn stood at his console. His broad face wore a cat’s grin. He seemed oblivious of the medic working behind him with scissors and a spray can of artificial skin.
“We’ve finished our job here,” Glenn said. “Now we’ll join Trunk and finish the rest of it. We can expect to contact—” his voice boomed in exultation “—the Seatiger main body within twenty-five minutes unless they run … and they can’t run fast enough!”
The Mouflon started to answer her helm, but for Wilding the sensation was almost lost in the vessel’s pitch and yaw through the wave. A 15,000-ton cruiser requires a great deal of time to change heading by 120°.
“Sir?” said the Mouflon’s flag captain. “Should we, ah … detach some light craft to tend the vessels that have been disabled?”
“Negative,” Captain Glenn snapped. “We have a job to do. We’ll rescue survivors as soon as the Seatigers surrender. Until then, they’ll have to fend for themself.”
“I’m done, sir,” muttered the medic.
Glenn flexed his shoulders and winced. By chance, he was glaring straight at Officer-Trainee as he concluded, “We’re not running a nursery. It’s the law of the jungle!”
15
MAY 18, 382 AS. 0626 HOURS.
Ensign Brainard looked downslope as the warning rang in his ears. With its keen sense of smell, the reptile would track them as inexorably as the tide came in.
OT Wilding leaped down the steep slope, sacrificing himself to the lizard’s jaws in order to save the rest of them. Wilding repeated, “Get back!” even while he slid and tumbled along the track the cypress had bulldozed.
It would work. The gift of one life would conceal the existence of five more from the short-sighted reptile.
Brainard opened his mouth to shout, “Back from the edge!” to his remaining crew.
Off the beach far below, the vine-covered torpedo craft sat like a flaw against the beautiful water surface, which quivered with the thousand colors of a fire opal.
Ted Holman had sacrificed his life to torpedo the Wiesel—and save K67 as it fled under Brainard’s command. Brainard wasn’t going to abandon Hal Wilding as well.