Kris Longknife: Mutineer

by Mike Shepherd

  Jose quickly brought the boat up to full speed, about twelve knots. It handled the waves on the bay well, breasting each swell with a cloud of spray that ended mostly back in the water, only some in the boat. Things were fine right up until they hit a snag with a thud and a bump and a sudden falloff in speed, even as the engine raced.

  “Damn sinker,” Jose growled as he brought the boat around and idled the engine. Off to their left, just a few centimeters below a wave trough, a log, maybe a quarter of a meter in diameter and spiked from shorn-off tree limbs, spun from their contact. Jose pulled something the size of a stylus from his shirt pocket, extended it into a meter-long pole, waited until the log settled down to a stable rocking motion, then hurled it at the log. It stuck, a red flare igniting at its high end. In a moment, Kris’s boat captain was on the radio.

  “Addie, I got a sinker out here near the landing run. It’s marked. You better come get it.”

  “Spotted your flare already,” a woman’s voice came back. “We’re under way. You in trouble?”

  “Maybe. I think we dinged our prop. I may need a tow.”

  “Can do two as well as one.”

  Kris was not ready to go back. She dropped her bailing bucket and headed for the control station. “You think you can do better?” Jose said, his face a mixture of macho defiance and rank embarrassment.

  “Maybe I can,” Kris said, punching the keypad opposite the wheel. The small view screen came to life. “On the Typhoon, my job is controlling what the liquid metal does in battle. There’s got to be a way to make this metal repair itself.”

  “You think so?”

  “Don’t know until I’ve tried.” The view screen was small, and the keypad just numeric; Kris found herself keying through a complex series of option screens, diving deeper and deeper into some kind of tree. It didn’t help that the screens had been written by someone for whom English was a very foreign language.

  “You aren’t going to dump us in the water, are you?” Tom asked. Kris took the question for serious, particularly after the nods his comment got from long Nabil and big Olaf.

  “I’ll try not to, but you might want to tighten your life vests. Never can tell what a spacer will do, out on deep water.”

  “Very funny.” Tom didn’t laugh. “She gets it wrong in space, we’re breathing vacuum,” he pointed out. But Olaf gave his vest harness a good pull, and Nabil eyed the waves around them dolefully. Kris found something that claimed to be propulsion repair, located her dory, then Water Screw, which she took for prop, and hit Repair. The screen blinked, then went blank.

  “Did that fix it?” Jose asked.

  “Try it,” Kris answered, not at all sure.

  Jose eased the throttle up; the boat took on way. “Feels right,” he said. “Yeah! Think you can take the dents out of the bow?” He pointed forward where the metal was pushed in.

  “I’ll try…when we’re on dry land,” Kris agreed. That got a laugh from captain and crew. Jose brought the boat up to something less than its full speed, posted two lookouts with long poles forward, and ordered the rest back to bailing. He motioned Kris to the command station.

  “You have a map of the bay?” Kris pulled out her reader, brought up the latest picture of the sprawling inlet, then overlaid a map from pre-disaster. “Will that help?”

  “Yeah. There’s a swamp over there with three rivers feeding in and a dozen ways out. Now they’re all just one big mess. We could be quite a ways up the wrong one before we knew it.”

  Kris tapped the Global Positioning Satellite button, and a plus appeared on the screen.

  “You have one of those, too. I had to hock mine.”

  “This will work,” Kris assured him, gave him the unit, and went back to bailing. She didn’t have to ask when they hit the river. Even with Jose putting the engine back to full power, they slowed down. Bare tree trunks stood starkly out of the water, marking where the shore had been. Even after this planet dried out, it would need a lot to recover.

  Kris stood, stretched her back, and turned to Jose. “Will we stay to the center of the river?”

  “Not if we want to get there before next week. Current out there is a good six, maybe eight knots. We stay away from that. Course, hitting trees is very bad. Nabil, Akuba up front, keep your eyes open. We don’t want to wrap the woman’s boat around a tree or rock.” The rain picked that moment to get thicker, and visibility dropped to hardly a boat length. Jose cut back on the throttle a little, and their headway fell to almost nothing.

  Progress was slow as the lookouts on the bow poled them away from rocks, shrubs, the odd building, and tree after tree. Kris glanced a few times at the main channel, but there was no going there. Maybe it had once been as placid as her lake back home. Now the water fought itself, roiling up, then crashing down in a shower of white water. Water gone mad with the power to turn trees to matchsticks and rocks to gravel. As dangerous as it was along the flooded bank, the main stream was suicide.

  Progress upriver was slow, punctuated with terror. Poling them off a tree, a stray current grabbed them, sending them downriver sideways and slamming them into a rock they’d just passed so carefully. Even big Olaf needed help pushing off. All hands applied poles, oars, and hands to the rock, only to unbalance the boat. Water poured in over the dented gunwale.

  “Navy to port, the other side, left,” Jose yelled as Tom went right. Kris fought her way hand over hand up the cargo lashings to hang as far over the left side as she dared, raising the bent but unpierced right side. Nabil and Akuba pushed the boat’s nose off, and Jose let the current carry them downstream a hundred meters while he made sure all was well before putting the engine back in gear and renewing the fight with the wild river.

  Kris glanced at her watch; they’d be doing good to make the Anderson Ranch before dark at this rate. She considered calling the Colonel but dropped the idea. She was committed; he could hang her for mutiny or insubordination later. There was little he could do now. Kris concentrated on riding the river.

  The rain came down in sheets. Tommy suggested they look for pillowcases to match. Mick answered he was ready for bed, with or without sheets. Which raised the question from Olaf as to who would share a bed with whom. Tired and wet, they could still laugh. If she had to ride a river gone mad, this was the crew to do it with.

  As hours went by, Kris grew wet and cold. Her muscles ached in places she hadn’t known she had. She couldn’t just ride this boat but had to work every moment to keep from being bashed against the liquid metal sides or slammed into the crates of food, maybe shattering the glass vials of vaccine. So Kris stayed on her feet, stooping over to bail, flexing her knees as the boat rose up to slap her or dropped out from underneath her. This was nothing like the cruise she and Tommy shared on the Oasis. Would she ever want to be on a body of water bigger than a Jacuzzi again?

  “That’s the Harmosa place,” Jose called to Kris, pointing at a rooftop between them and the roiling river. “Andersons are next, about three miles farther upriver. Everything is going fine.”

  As the captain said that, they rounded a bend in the river. Out of nowhere, an eddy from the main channel caught them. Jose held on to the wheel with both hands, his legs wrapped around the wheel post, fighting the swirling current. The boat whirled as it rose and fell; the worst bucking they’d had all day. Tommy lost his hold and was half overboard before Kris got a hand on his belt. The next pitch and drop would have thrown them both over the side if Mick hadn’t gotten a hand on them, his feet entwined in the cargo lashings. Finally, Olaf managed to make his way across the cargo. He grabbed Tommy and Kris by their packs with his big paws and tossed them into the bottom of the boat like they were kittens.

  Kris lay on her belly for a long minute, gasping for breath, letting the rain pour down on her, the sloshing water soak into her. She had really gotten herself and Tommy into a mess this time. It was almost over. Just a bit more, she told herself as she struggled to her feet, both hands wrapped around cargo l
ashings and a leg through a third to boot.

  “Thanks, Kris,” Tommy said.

  “Thanks to all of you,” Kris added peering at each of her crew through the gathering darkness.

  “We thank you.” Jose laughed. “Think of the stories we will tell when we get back.” Olaf and Mick seemed to like that. Nabil just shook his head. Akuba never looked up from his place on the bow, looking for snags.

  Now it was getting seriously dark. A glance at her wrist told Kris this was a lot earlier than it should have been. Part of the gloom was the incessant downpour. But they were also in the shadows of the cliffs rising a good 300 meters high on the south side of the gorge the river ran through. “There’s rapids three, four miles past the Anderson place,” Jose called to all hands. “Let’s keep our eyes open, crew. We’ll be in a mess if we go too far.”

  Kris tried a call on net and got only static. “Nelly, do a radio search. Call anyone on net.”

  Nelly reported a null search. “Their batteries may be dead,” Kris told Jose and the crew. “Silence means nothing,” she assured them. Why didn’t it reassure her?

  Now Nabil and Akuba on the bow brought out handheld lights. The rain seemed to slacken; in the growing gloom it could easily have been more a wish than reality. Still, they were a good hundred meters off when Nabil’s beam settled on the waterlogged wreckage of a multistory building. Jose throttled back, and they approached it carefully. The top floor had been burned; a few of the larger timbers showed black above the water. Where the river’s water lapped along the top floor, two skulls eyed them through empty sockets.

  “Mother of God.” Jose crossed himself and steered away.

  “They said they’d burned the dead,” Kris said. “I guess that was where.”

  “That’s the old house, where the Andersons started fifty years ago. The main place should be over there,” Jose said, pointing off to the left. Slowly, the boat headed in that direction. The rain came back; they almost rammed the first flooded outbuilding before they saw it. Water was halfway up its low walls. “That’s a cattle barn. Start looking for a fence,” Jose ordered. Kris decided it was time to call home.

  “Colonel Hancock, this is Ensign Longknife.” Only static. Kris repeated herself with the same results. “Nelly?”

  “I estimate we are in the shadow of the cliffs,” Nelly said. “I cannot get a line of sight on the communications satellite from where we are.”

  “In this dark, I am not taking us out where the current can get us,” Jose said before Kris could say a word.

  “I wasn’t going to ask,” Kris assured him.

  “We’re at the fence,” Mick called from the bow.

  Jose steered right. “I think there’s a gate somewhere around here. I’m cutting the engine. Get ready to pole.” They found a hole in the fence before they found any gate. Once through, Jose headed into the dark. The lights picked up more flooded buildings. The boat bumped against things hidden in the water; again, Jose cut the motor, and they poled. When the next break in the rain gave them a good look around, they were in the middle of the farmyard. Houses, barns, other outbuildings surrounded them, all flooded. No lights showed.

  “They’ve got to be around here somewhere,” Kris frowned.

  Jose frowned, too. “There’s a couple of hay barns, closer to the cliffs. One or two houses there, too.” He pointed to the right, and they poled in that direction. Once past the last barn, and the fence that began at its edge, the current picked up, and the poling got harder. Jose reached to start the motor.

  “Wait a second,” Kris called. “You hear that?” The sound of rain and the river made it hard to hear anything. But as the silence stretched and the crew held its collective breath, the dull roar became more insistent.

  “The falls.” Jose sighed. “It must be real bad to make that much noise. But we aren’t going to get anywhere against this current by poling.” He flipped the engine on, but kept his speed very slow. The land they passed over must have been rolling at better times. Here and there a few bedraggled cows stood on small islands or wallowed in mud up to their utters. They passed a tiny herd that must have taken shelter on a lower island. As miserable as the cows appeared, they must have been the pampered survivors, some optimist’s hope that he could save enough to start a new herd when the rains stopped. Now the water was up to the shoulders of this remnant; they lowed pitifully as the helpless humans passed them.

  “There’s not going to be anything left of us,” Nabil muttered to Akuba.

  “There’s something up ahead. Looks like a fire,” Olaf shouted from his station on the bow. Jose cut the engine. It took them a while to separate out the sounds of the rain and roar of the river, but there are few things sweeter than the sound of a human voice. Olaf cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted in his booming baritone, “Ahoy the ranch.”

  On the third shout he got an answer. “What bloody ranch? And who are you? I got a rifle.”

  “Jose,” their captain shouted back, “with a boat full of medicine and food. You want me to land or keep going?”

  “We can probably find you a place to tie up for the night, if you got the rope.”

  “I got the rope. You got a tree?”

  “Nope, but if you got food, I’ll hold the bleeding rope all night.” Six figures slowly materialized out of the mist. One held up a hand, and Olaf tossed him a rope. The six pulled with a will, and the boat glided up to a muddy landing.

  “God, man, are we glad to see you. There any more boats?”

  “Only this one. Where is everyone?” Kris asked as she stepped over the side into mud up to her ankles.

  “Some left before it got too bad. Some are sleeping cheek to jowl under what roofs we have. Some are out here, worrying. You heard our message?”

  “We know about the Grearson fever. I got a corpsman here with the vaccine.” Kris pointed at the medic as he clambered out of the boat, his two stuffed bags showing a Red Cross/Red Crescent/Red Star. Kris held out her hand to the man who’d been doing the talking. “I’m Ensign Kris Longknife of the Society of Humanity Navy at your service.”

  From somewhere in the fog Kris heard, “We got a bloody Longknife all the hell and gone out here?” but the handshake and smile that greeted her was friendly. “Glad for anything you got,” said a man with graying hair, wearing clothes that hung on him like there’d been a lot more to cover a year ago. “I’m Sam Anderson. My pa started this ranch.” He glanced around into the foggy dark as if seeing all there was and once had been. “I guess I’ll end it. Listen, how many can you get out on this boat? We got a couple of dozen sick, plus our old and kids. I figure before morning we’re gonna have to start climbing the cliff. It would be nice to get the weakest out by boat.”

  “How many do you have?” Kris asked, getting back into the now-empty hull.

  “Minus the three that died today, ninety-eight. Why?”

  “Because this boat is a bit different from the average. What you see isn’t necessarily what you get.” Kris got the screen up and went through the original list. “There’s an option here for a river scow/motorized. Good for ferrying trucks up to ten thousand kilos. A hundred and ten people ought to fit. Fifteen meters by six meters. Thirty centimeters of free clearance at full load. Jose, you willing to take that out on the river?”

  “Tomorrow. Not in the dark.”

  “I’ll do the conversion now just in case the river gets too high tonight.”

  “Good idea,” Sam said as Kris punched the conversion option. Even in the dark, the metal walls around Kris took on a gleaming appearance. The high prow began to settle, the sides rolled away as the boat widened from three meters to six.

  Then the entire structure of the boat collapsed onto the ground. For a second, Kris thought this was just part of the process, but then flat sections of metal began to break up, mingle with the raindrops, and settle to the bottom of puddles. Kris grabbed a handful of control pillar as it began to come apart. Quickly, she stooped and scooped up a
mixture of mud and liquid metal from a puddle with her other hand. In her palms, the metal formed globules like liquid mercury.

  “What the hell?” Kris gasped, along with similar expletives from those around her. She controlled the temptation to hurl the liquid metal on the ground. “Quick, someone, get two of those vaccine bottles out of my pack. Empty the vaccine. I’ve got to store this crud.”

  “But waste vaccine?” Tommy asked, even as he got Kris’s pack open.

  “We’ve got vaccine for three hundred and only a hundred here. But I am going to know what just happened.”

  “If we live that long,” Sam added sourly.

  Kris and Tommy got the samples of their boat into bottles and capped them. One had quite a bit of mud in with the metal. Well, that was Olympia for you. Kris looked around for another sample, but in just the time it took to do that, all evidence that a river dory had ever been here was gone.

  “Let’s get the supplies out of the rain,” Sam drawled. “If we’re going to drown before morning, we might as well do it on a full stomach.”

  “I never took you for an optimist, Sam,” Jose said.

  “A year of gray skies, dead cows, crop failure, and cabin fever, then this fever, would make even you throw in the towel.”

  “Maybe. You heard the man, let’s get some food up to these folks. Hungry people don’t make good decisions, and the water is rising.” The boat crew loaded up what they had, helped by a dozen ranch hands that were there or materialized out of the rain and fog. The new arrivals were quiet. The ranchers seemed to return to an interrupted conversation.

  “I say we build some rafts. We still got two houses left. Tear down their walls and use ‘em to float downriver.”

  “They’re wood and plaster walls, Ted. They’d never last an hour on the river. Besides, out there is no place for anything less than a full boat. What you say to that, Jose?”