My knees trembled, and I clutched a sapling while I leaned. My Airborne School Ticket reads “Restricted,” because the shrinks diagnosed me with Treatable Acrophobia. “Treatable” means “dope-able,” and I don’t dope. So whenever I had to drop, I just used to squeeze my eyes shut, then order Ord to boot me down the extraction tube. I say this proves my command deficiency. Commanders have no phobias. Ord says true commanders just control them.
The trail below switched back and forth down the cliff, then threaded along the river bank among the trees, as far as I could see.
I pointed back at the slowly descending ship, where Wilgan rode, and asked Bassin every infantryman’s first question. “Why do we have to walk?”
Bassin frowned, then pointed at the catch pool. Around the slowly revolving wheels of the Locks’ great mechanism floated curved sticks and twigs. Under magnification, they resolved into the ribs and guts of ships that looked like they had fallen half a mile. “The transit’s risky. Only Masters stay aboard.”
“Then why even bother? This trail looks like it was here for a long time before you built the Locks.”
Bassin turned to me, crossed his arms, and squinted. “Why does a man of your age and intelligence ask a child’s questions, Jason?”
The whole truth would have sounded like lunacy or lies. “I’m new here,” I said.
The First Mate looked over his shoulder at the trees behind us, then said to Bassin, “Best keep moving, Colonel. Howlers.”
I frowned, and rubbed my throbbing phony fingers as we descended deeper and the air got thicker.
The trail into the gorge narrowed, so our column broke down in side-by-side pairs, three yards apart. I wound up striding alongside Bassin.
He picked up our discussion like we hadn’t been interrupted. “You know the Queen’s full title is ‘Deliverer of the Stones, Protector of the Clans of Marin, and Sovereign of the Near Seas.’”
I knew nothing of the kind, but I nodded.
Bassin said, “Note that her charge to Deliver the Stones comes before everything else. Every year since The Beginning, every child has been taught that Bren delivers or Bren dies. Every year since The Beginning, Stone demand has grown.”
The trail traversed a steep section cut through limestone, improved with iron hand grabs corroded by time, and flats cut in the stone where a climber could rest a heavy load. I, much less one-legged Bassin, couldn’t descend and have breath left for talking.
What Bassin had just told me linked up some clues. The Slugs were nothing but galactic shakedown artists. Cough up our Cavorite fuel, and nobody gets hurt. For centuries, the Clans had evolved their entire society to feed their visitors’ Cavorite habit, even if it meant cooperating with other Clans. But then, why had the little maggots blitzed the Fair yesterday, for the first time in so long that most people seemed to recognize Slugs only as pictures from a book?
Skrreek!
The trail flattened out, and I looked up at the branches that arced overhead. A chittering banana-colored lizard as large as a monkey swung from a vine by a forelimb, and bared its teeth at me.
I waited for Bassin to catch up. Well-formed or not, the prosthetic that replaced his leg made him wince with every step. The leg that Wilgan had said slavers had cut off. I pointed at it. “Bren delivers. Even if the society has to turn to slavery to meet the quota?”
Bassin shrugged. “I’d die on the pyre before I’d live in chains, or suffer another to do so. But Bren has known The Block, in one location or another, for millennia.”
“But if you could find a way to deliver the Stones without slave labor, so it wasn’t a necessary evil, then your society could change things. You designed these locks to make slave stone carriers obsolete?”
He shrugged again. “That was one reason. The slavers thought the locks would hurt their business. And they were unhappy with the fellow who designed them. My locks have hurt the slavers. But the few slaves saved were like tears saved from the ocean. Jason, necessity long ago became convenience. Too many men are comfortable owning other men.”
I gazed again at the huge scale of the slowly rising and falling locks, then narrowed my eyes at Bassin. A full-bird Colonel like Bassin may be a demigod to a sailor, but the locks were a project for a preindustrial society like the Marini on the scale of the pyramids.
Before I could frame anther question to Bassin, another banana lizard squealed its high-pitched chitter at us. I asked Bassin, “Is that a Howler?”
In the distance, low-pitched screams grew, echoing off the gorge’s walls like a fire brigade racing to a five-alarm.
Bassin unslung his rifle, then smiled. “What do you think?”
Thirty-Five
Five hundred yards further, the half dozen sailors on point slowed and peered ahead at a place where tree boles narrowed the trail to shoulder width, forming a dim tunnel roofed by leaves. Bassin and I walked first behind them. Jude, Ord, and Howard trailed us, and a half-dozen more sailors trailed them.
The screaming grew to a chorus in the surrounding trees.
The First Mate halted our group with an upraised hand, and said, “Let’s get a count.”
He raised his rifle, and fired a shot in the air.
The screams swelled until I had to chin down my audio gain.
A living thing sprang into the path between the tree boles. It was a stump-tailed lizard covered in rust-colored feathers, except around a flat face, streaked in red and purple and set with dark eyes. Its forelimbs were longer and thicker than its haunches, and it sprang forward on them, screeching, then hopped back, like an angry baboon, but as large as a gorilla.
A dozen more Howlers sprang into view, some leaping out into the path, some dangling from overhanging limbs by a single forelimb.
“Bag off!” The First Mate reloaded his rifle, then thrust the muzzle forward at the big one that had appeared first, and shook his head. “Don’t make me take that pelt of yours!”
The Howlers just jumped, swung, and screamed more, but when the sailor stepped one foot forward, the big Howler dropped one foot back.
The First Mate crept forward, rifle in one hand, and waved the other hand for us to follow. “Steady on, mates.”
Rifles up, we shuffled between the shrieking Howlers, one so close that I could count his teeth, as his spit splattered my visor.
The ones on the trail would leap forward, bare their teeth, then retreat, then repeat the behavior. The ones in the trees would swing down, slap at a helmet, then pull themselves back up onto a branch.
Bassin whispered, “Once they realize that we’re only passing through their territory, they’ll draw back.”
Howard whispered in my earpiece, “Isn’t this great?”
Blam.
Behind me, a Howler wailed in a different key.
I spun, and saw a sailor in the rear group clutching his bleeding shoulder. The rifle of the man alongside him smoked from its muzzle.
Both men stared down at a Howler, lying still in the middle of the trail at their feet, like a rusty sack of feathers.
The howling died, and the air became so still that the only sound was the Falls’ distant whisper.
The First Mate sighed. “Young male on his muscle.” He glanced around. “That will back them off for an hour.” He walked back to the man the Howler had bitten, unwrapping a bandage, and turned to the others. “Right. Rest ten minutes.”
The man with the rifle knelt on the trail, drew a knife from his belt, and began to skin the dead lizard.
I walked to the kneeling man, and stood beside Jude. Howard bent, hands on knees, peering at the carcass. “With that pelvis, it’s a theropod. More parallel evolution.”
I said, “Parallel my ass. Wronks are like Earth carnosaurs. Duckbills are like Earth duckbills. Earth didn’t have dinosaur chimps.”
“Not parallel to Cretaceous fauna. To primates. This reptile occupies a niche the great apes occupy on Earth.” Howard swung his hand at the steep wall the trail clung to. “Bes
ides, do you think an upland species’ skeletons are going to get buried in the river as often as fish bones? If we haven’t found primate-mimic dinosaurs on Earth, we just may not have looked in enough places yet. You see what this all implies about the people here, don’t you?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. Tell—”
Deep in the trees, a single Howler cried.
I looked down at the meat that had been a living thing minutes ago. Was the cry his mother’s?
Jude stared into the trees, toward the sound.
I tapped his shoulder, and pointed toward the trail ahead. “Time to move on.”
We saw no more Howlers, but six hours later, when we rejoined the ship and Wilgan, we could hear the lizard monkeys far behind us.
This planet scared us Earthlings. But our technology would scare Bren’s natives like we were space invaders. Which, of course, we were.
Therefore, that evening, as Wilgan sailed us on toward the coast, only us four Earthlings and Bassin clustered around the holo generator set up on the forecastle table to review the data Jeeb had gathered in his reconnaissances.
Bassin passed his fingers through the holo image, with his mouth widened into an “O.” “It’s done with light, then?”
Howard nodded.
Bassin shook his head, slowly. At least he didn’t call us warlocks.
Ord switched the display to map view, and there we were, a flashing red icon inching down the River Marin toward its delta, which was straddled by Bren’s one great city, Marinus.
Bassin unrolled parchments, borrowed from Wilgan, on the table, weighted their corners with brass map instruments, and looked back and forth between those charts and Jeeb’s images.
“Jason, your chart shows the bar we just passed, which was new after the past spring’s flood.” Bassin tapped the corresponding spot on Wilgan’s parchment, which showed blue water. “But Wilgan would have grounded if he relied on the Admiralty’s chart.”
I pointed at our map. “This is an embellished real-time image. You’re seeing the world through the eyes of the flying thing you saw me talking to when we were Casuni prisoners.”
“The insect is a machine?”
I pointed at the brass map scale in Bassin’s hand. “As much a machine as that thing.”
“The machine talks through the atmosphere, as real as my voice. But as invisible as my voice, too?”
“Basically.”
He closed his eye, and sighed. “I need a moment to absorb this.”
I asked Bassin, “Why are we going to Marinus?”
Bassin opened his eye and said, “We aren’t.”
He drew his finger across his map, down the river, past the city, to the mouth where the river emptied into the sea. “We’re bound for the Sea of Hunters.” He turned his finger and traced south along the coastline a hundred miles. “By this time of year, the Queen has taken to the Winter Palace. I’m going there because she prefers even bad news fresh.”
I glanced at Howard as I raised my eyebrows. Did Bassin also suspect that it was our arrival on this planet that had brought the Slugs down upon Bren like a dung storm? I said to Bassin, “Bad news?”
“We can’t talk through the air, like you can. The Queen will have no news of the Fair until I reach her.”
I pointed at a bold red line on the map that paralleled the coast, from a half mile to several miles out to sea, all the way from the north end of the chart to the south end. “What’s the red line?”
“Six fathoms.”
“Is that a territorial limit?”
The First Mate called down the hatch, “Colonel Bassin, we need those charts back up here, Sir!”
As Bassin rerolled the charts, he smiled. “You could say the Red Line marks territory, yes.”
The more I knew Bassin, the better I liked him. Except that he hoarded information like an Intel dick, based on what he thought was someone’s need-to-know.
The two days from that time until we reached the sea were a nice boat ride, punctuated by descents through two more sets of locks. After Bassin’s Locks, these locks were boring, with gates into and out of chambers that flooded and drained, lowering our ship in fifty-foot increments.
The ship got towed from chamber to chamber by hawsers attached to bellowing purple and brown draft animals bigger than elephants, with horns that had been sawed off by their handlers. Howard pronounced them analogous to ceratopsian dinosaurs.
So complete had been the Slugs’ destruction of the Marini trading fleet that I didn’t see another sailing ship on the Marin. But smaller local packets swarmed the river. A few moved under sail, but most of them were rowed by ranks of slaves, twenty-five to a side, like Greek galley rowers.
We ghosted through the Marin estuary in a single rainy night, so all we saw of the city were flickering lights and spots of red glow. Bassin said the glow marked the forges of the weapons foundries, which had burned continuously for three hundred years. Wilgan said the glow was the raging wickedness of places that separated sailors from their senses and their pay.
The next day dawned clear, with the ship already well down the coast. Wilgan and I stood alone on the rain-washed deck, side by side. The Ship Master steered as we ran south before the wind, while below, the others took breakfast. I had laid my armor out on deck to air, and Wilgan and I chewed warm biscuits the cook had brought us.
The shore lay a mile from us, and small boats from fishing villages already dotted the shallows as they put to sea.
A half mile distant, to the east, toward deep water, a smaller ship, black sails full and taut, passed us like we were anchored.
Wilgan glanced seaward at the fast mover and swore.
I smiled. “Are we losing a race?”
“Red Line runners are smugglers, not racers.”
“Red Line?” I pointed at the smaller ship. “That’s where the depth hits six fathoms?”
Wilgan nodded. “She’s bound for the Tassini ports south, with a belly full of rifles, by her draft.”
I nodded. “The smuggler stays on the Red Line so the government won’t stop him?”
“But if he strays too deep, the Coasties will be the least of his worries.” Wilgan glanced seaward again, and swore again. He locked the wheel, then stepped to the rail, where an ivory horn, carved from a tusk as big as an elephant’s, swiveled on an iron mounting. Wilgan swung the horn toward the smuggling vessel, blew into it, and a note echoed across the waves.
The black ship ran on, oblivious.
Wilgan blew another note, then pounded his fist on the huge horn, and shouted. “You’re too far out, you fool!”
“What’s wrong, Wilgan?”
The white-bearded sailor stretched his telescope, and peered through it at the other ship. “Put on that hat of yours with the spyglasses, and you’ll see.”
I picked my helmet off the deck, dropped it on, and focused my optics on the other vessel.
A couple of crewmen scurried over the black ship’s deck, and the ship’s bow rose and fell as it cut the sea. “It looks like nothing—”
“Too late! Dumb bastards.”
Seaward of the black ship, a faint wake curled a vee across the waves. I zoomed on it.
At the vee’s apex, a fistful of dirty-white snakes broke the surface, fifty yards from the black ship, and closing on it.
White smoke puffed at the ship’s bow, then I heard a rifle’s faint crack.
The snakes rose further out of the water, and resolved into two dozen suckered, flailing fire hoses, in front of an eye as big and yellow as a stop sign.
Wilgan said, “Kraken.”
The hoses wrapped the ship’s hull, and as the ship heeled, the monster’s body came up out of the water. It looked like a giant squid, but with more arms. The beast was stuffed into the end of a tapered shell fifty feet long, like writhing ice cream in a cone.
The others clambered up from below at the sounds of Wilgan’s horn, and the shot.
Howard said, “Holy moly!”
&n
bsp; The black ship’s masts snapped like straw. A single human scream echoed across the water, then the monster slid backward and pulled the black ship under like a tarantula dragging a beetle into a burrow.
Jude gripped the rail, eyes wide. “What was that?”
Howard whistled. “That’s the biggest nautiloid I’ve ever heard of!” He turned to Wilgan. “Are these top predators numerous?”
“Top predator?” Wilgan snorted. “That pissant?” He rapped on the tusk horn he had blown, which was as big around as my thigh. “This warning horn’s made from a rhind tooth.”
Wilgan held up his biscuit between thumb and forefinger, and pointed at it with his other index finger. “Kraken.” He opened his mouth, then pointed at his tonsils. “Rhind.”
Wilgan popped the biscuit into his mouth, bit down, swallowed, then grinned. “Any questions?”
Howard said, “Oh.”
I stared at the empty sea that rolled where the smuggling ship had been, as half-chewed biscuit caught in my throat. I gulped, then asked Wilgan, “Could we sail closer to shore?”
Wilgan returned to the wheel, laughing and slapping his thigh. “Top preddy-tours!” He shook his head. “Landlubbers!”
I walked to the bow, where Bassin stood.
I said, “Is a rhind the scariest thing on this planet?”
Bassin peered ahead, where the sun glinted off something atop a distant headland. I zoomed on the glint, which was a turreted complex of white stone that commanded a coastal bluff.
Bassin pointed at the bluff. “Her Majesty will receive us at noon. You may decide for yourself.”
Thirty-Six
The beast that menaced Howard, Jude and me for our last few hours at sea was neither kraken, rhind, nor Queen.
Ord was not about to allow any troops with which he was associated to go before royalty looking unsoldierly. We polished armor, shaved, cleaned weapons, re-polished, re-shaved, re-cleaned, washed everything that moved and scrubbed everything that didn’t. Even Jeeb, who Bassin asked us to bring along so the Queen wouldn’t think he was nuts, got his radar-absorbent fuzz groomed, and Jude polished Jeeb’s optics.
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