Seas of Venus
Page 12
"Recognize it?" Uncle Dan said, waving toward the image on which the younger man's eyes were focused. He was smiling, but he almost always smiled; and this was not an expression of real humor.
"No, I don't," Johnnie said. "Where is it?"
"It's one of the outlet glaciers of Vatnajökull," his uncle explained. "On Earth. Before."
Johnnie looked hard at the scene. Ice, then; sliding across the land and carrying streaks of dirt and crushed rock with it to the sea. Hard to imagine such a volume of water cold enough to freeze—and under an open sky, as here. . . .
But that had been Earth.
"I like," Dan repeated softly, "to be reminded that there are alternatives. This particular view reminds me that some alternatives are closed off forever, because of what men like me did or failed to do a very long time ago."
"Ah," said Johnnie. "It's disconcerting, I guess. To me, at least."
He forced a smile. "But maybe that's good."
"Come into the office with me," Dan said, stepping toward the wall of jungle. "I want to go over the table of equipment for the operation—unless you're too tired? I was going to have Britten make up a bunk for you in the office after we'd finished, but you can have my bed if you'd like."
His hand swung back a door which seemed to be part of the trunk of a fallen giant. A pack of mutated slime molds now slithered their way through the foliage, leaving gray, burned patches behind them. The section of office visible through the opening was even more dissonant than the lines along the corners where the holographic images joined.
"I'm fine," Johnnie said. "I—look, I'm doing fine, but I couldn't sleep now anyway, Uncle Dan."
"Nothing wrong with living on your nerves, John," the older man said with a chuckle as he led Johnnie into the office. "Myself, I've been doing it for years. Britten, why don't you get us all something to eat?"
The sergeant's face split in a grin. "Hearty meals for the condemned, you mean, sir?" he said.
"Don't laugh, boyo," Dan called back through the closing door. "You're going too, you know."
"Indeed I am, sir," Britten said in a muffled voice. "You didn't think you could keep me away from an operation this bughouse crazy, did you?"
Britten sounded cheerful; Johnnie was scared.
Not scared of the jungle, exactly, though his view of their likelihood of success in reaching the harbor by the back way was nowhere near as sanguine as the one Uncle Dan had polished in Admiral Bergstrom's office. . . . And not scared about the risks involved in first capturing a dreadnought, then sailing away in it while pursued by at least three other battleships. Johnnie hadn't been able to think that far ahead.
He wasn't afraid the operation would fail: he was afraid it would fail because of him.
"Are you sure you're all right, John?" his uncle said.
"I don't want to mess up, Uncle Dan."
"Join the club," the older man replied; and again, there was very little humor in his smile.
The office was smaller than the Senator's—Commander Cooke had no need to impress anyone here. The walls were cream-colored, enlivened neither with real windows nor by holographic views like that of the living room.
The desk was double-sided. A light-pen lay in front of the identical consoles which faced one another; a similar pen was in its holder at the other station. Three visicubes aligned with the long axis of the slate-colored expanse were the only other ornamentation.
"Well, sit down," Dan said as he slid into one of the consoles. "I didn't really figure the Admiral would agree to fifty men—the second submarine doubles that aspect of the risk, after all—but I think thirty will be sufficient for what we need to do."
The senior officer's right hand played over the keypad while his left removed the pen from its holder. Columns of names and figures, the Blackhorse personnel roster, glowed in the air between them. The holograms shifted as they began to sort themselves according to skills and efficiency ratings.
Johnnie was staring at the visicubes.
"You won't know the men, of course," Dan said, "but—"
He looked at his nephew and paused.
"I'm sorry," Johnnie blurted in embarrassment, raising his eyes.
"Oh, they're worth looking at, lad," his uncle said with an honest laugh.
Each cube held the image of a different woman: a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette with white skin and almond eyes. The blonde was a statuesque beauty; the redhead was heavier than some men's taste, though Titian would have painted her as Venus; and the brunette was bone-thin.
Their expressions were equally alluring, even frozen in the visicubes.
"Go ahead, touch them," Dan said.
"Are they all your . . ."
"Friends?"
"Wives, I meant," Johnnie said.
His index finger tapped the touch-sensitive patch at the bottom of the first cube. The blonde's face suddenly brightened in a smile. Her voice, lilting despite the limits of the reproduction medium, said, "Hello, Dan. I'm really looking forward to seeing you again, so don't do anything foolish. All right?"
The image blew a kiss.
"Companions, yes," his uncle agreed without expression.
Johnnie touched the second cube, as much as anything so that he had something to look at instead of the older man. "Do they . . . know about each other?"
"Dan," said the plump redhead, "You don't want to hear how much I love you . . . but when you come home, I'll make you as happy as a woman can make a man."
"They'd almost have to, wouldn't they, lad?" Dan said coolly. "I don't volunteer any information, and they don't ask me. But sure, I assume they know, all three of them."
The dark-haired woman lifted an eyebrow, then adjusted the scooped neckline of her violet blouse. She grinned, but the image did not speak.
"Don't they care?" Johnnie said. He looked up. "Don't they care?"
"Johnnie," said his uncle, "life isn't simple. I don't put any restrictions on them that I wouldn't keep myself. They find that acceptable, I suppose, or they'd find someone else."
He licked his dry lips. "But that's me, and them. We're individuals. And my sister—your mother—is an individual too, living her own sort of life. With men and women, there aren't certainties for everybody. Not the way your father thought there ought to be; and not the way I live my life, either."
Dan reached out and squeezed the younger man's hand against the desktop.
"Sorry," Johnnie said. He twisted his hand palm-up and returned the grip.
Uncle Dan grinned impishly. "These cubes can be programmed to take a double message, you know?" he said. "And keyed to a particular fingerprint as to which they play."
He touched the third visicube with the little finger of his right hand. The brunette pulled the puff sleeves of her blouse down to display her breasts. They were well-defined though small, and the areolae were almost black.
"Dan, darling, dearest Dan," the image said in a husky voice, "I wish you were here with me now so that you could kiss my nipples, so that you could bite my nipples the way you do, because that's ecstasy for me. . . ."
Johnnie stared at the wall. His face felt hot and he was sure that he was blushing.
"Everybody's different, lad," Dan said with a chuckle as the visicube returned to its innocent static state. "Figure out how you want to live your own life and don't worry about other people. Especially about relatives."
The door opened. Sergeant Britten, carrying a platter with two place settings, a dish of chicken and dumplings, and a visicube, stood silhouetted against the glacial scene on the opposite wall.
"Ready now, sir?" he asked.
"Ready for raw Pomeranian," Dan said, patting his flat stomach. "Set it right down here."
"When I unpacked," Britten said as he doled out the plates and flatware with the skill of a croupier, "I found this, sir. I didn't know where you wanted it placed."
"This" was a visicube containing the image of a plumpish, attractive woman of middle age—Beryl Haynes
.
"Umm, yes," said Dan. "I had one of our techs make it up for me back at the dome. It's by way of being a gift for Captain Haynes . . . but I'd rather he didn't know about it. Since you know Greider, his batman . . . can you get it into his quarters to replace the cube he usually keeps in his combat uniform?"
Sergeant Britten grinned. "With what Greider owes me from poker last month? You know I can! I can get you Haynes' desk and Greider'll help me carry it."
Dan began spooning out the savoury dish onto his plate and Johnnie's both. "You're a jewel, Britten," he said. "Try to come back from this operation, will you?"
"No fear," snorted the sergeant as he left the office with the cube and the empty platter. "If you buy it, try to get swallowed whole, will you? I don't want to have to carry a—"
The door closed. Vaguely through it: "—bloody corpse back."
16
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain. . . .
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Viewed through the image intensifier in Johnnie's visor, the water at the creek-mouth boiled with life.
And death.
The jungle glimpsed from a fleet's base or in the holographic environs of a simulator seemed to be the army of Nature arrayed against Man. Here the battle was just as intense and Man was not even an incident. The varied factions of Nature were too busy fighting one another to notice the beached submarine.
"For God's sake, hurry with that chute!" said the submarine's commander, Lieutenant van Diemann.
As though the words had flown straight to heaven from his lips, there was a hiss from the bulky apparatus four of the party were deploying from a cylinder welded to the sub's deck. A tube two meters in diameter, stiffened by a glass plate floor, began to extend slowly in the direction of the shore. Sergeant Britten, carrying a flamethrower, rode the tip of the protective chute.
"You may have to edge a little closer," said Commander Cooke. "I'm not sure the hundred feet will be enough."
"I can't!" van Diemann snapped. "We're already aground!"
Dan turned with the easy motion of a marksman and said, "I know you're aground, Lieutenant. I said you might have to edge a little closer to shore through the bottom muck. If you're incapable of carrying out the maneuver, I'm sure it's within the capacity of Ensign Gordon here."
Uncle Dan is scared, and he's taking it out on other people . . . who are scared too.
Something huge had died or been washed up at the creek-mouth; Johnnie couldn't be sure whether the creature had come from the jungle or the sea to begin with. Now the corpse was a Debatable Land for scavengers and things which preyed on scavengers . . . and those who devoured them in turn.
Crabs a foot across the carapace backed together to form iron rings which rotated slowly across the carrion. One large pincer tore the flesh into strips of a size that the mandibles could worry loose, but the other pincer was always raised to threaten any creature that moved nearby.
Occasionally something with a long beak or armored paws would pluck at the defensive circles, but for the most part the crabs were safe—
Unless two groups collided. When that happened, the rings flattened against one another and all thought of food or defense was lost in a ravening urge to slay their closest kin—and therefore closest rivals. Other predators coldly picked their victims from behind or simply waited for crushed and fractioned debris to be flung away by other crabs.
"Sorry, sir," said van Diemann. "But we—I mean, a stranded sub would be a dead giveaway to an Angel reconnaissance flight, wouldn't it?"
"If you weren't the best submarine commander in the Blackhorse, Ted," Uncle Dan said, "I'd've picked somebody else for the mission. You're good enough to work her loose before daylight and the thermals."
"Shall I . . . ?" The lieutenant offered.
Dan shook his head. "The chute's going to reach. I was nervous, and you say things when you're nervous."
Something slithered from the sea, dripping with soft phosphorescence. Johnnie thought it was a root or a tentacle, but it bore jaws that slashed a chunk from the carcass. The whole creature vanished back the way it had come with a bulge of meat working its way down the throat. Moments later the fish was back for another piece, but this time an insect as large as the lid of a garbage can slid across the water's surface and stabbed.
There was a flurry like the explosion of a depth charge. As much as ten yards of the fish writhed to the surface at one time, but the insect kept its grip with suicidal intensity until both combatants were lost in the roiling water.
Life on Venus was a constant round of struggle and slaughter, meaningless except perhaps in some greater framework hidden from the participants. The humans on the surface of the planet—the mercenary companies—conformed to the same paradigm.
"Ready the lead element," snapped Sergeant Britten as the inflating tube neared the shore at the speed of a staggering walk.
"Lead element report," Johnnie ordered, letting the artificial intelligence in his helmet route the request to the men of his team. A block in the upper right corner of his visor glowed yellow, then went green in nine quick increments as the lead element reported ready.
The lead element. The forlorn hope.
"Lead element ready," Johnnie said crisply.
Long, trailing branches swayed toward the carrion from the canopy as if carried by a breeze, but the air was still. One of the tendrils curled vaguely in the direction of the beached submarine.
"Watch tha—" Johnnie said, butting his rifle to his shoulder.
As he spoke, a spark that the troops' visors blanked to save their vision slapped between the bare tips of two of the hanging branches. A squadron of crabs and hundreds of the lesser creatures crawling around them froze in varied attitudes of death. The tendrils began to twine around the quantity of freshly-electrocuted meat, ignoring the carrion.
Johnnie fired with the flash. His explosive bullet whacked the base of the branch questing toward the men. It dangled from a strip of bark for an instant, then fell into the water where a boil of teeth met it.
Others of the men on the cramped deck jerked around in surprise to look at the young ensign.
"You'd think," said Commander Cooke, removing all question about the propriety of the shot, "that the jungle would let us come to it . . . but I suppose it's a case of the early bird and the worm."
"The worm's got teeth," said Lieutenant van Diemann, who was about twenty-five years old. "Nice shot, kid."
"Send the lead element forward," said Sergeant Britten's voice in the helmet earphones. Johnnie, as head of the lead element, was part of the command net.
"Lead element forward," Uncle Dan—Commander Cooke—ordered.
"Lead element, follow me," said Johnnie as he slipped the magazine with one round fired into the pouch from which he'd just taken a fresh reload. He stepped into the tube; and, as soon as the protective walls were around him, began to jog from eagerness and a desire to release tension.
The chute was a standard design which most of the free companies used for fire-fighting and expanding their bases into the jungle. The walls were woven of fine-spun quartz monofilament, refractory in themselves and interlaid with bands of beryllium which could be electrified if necessary. Mounting one on the deck of a submarine was awkward, but nowhere near as difficult as most of this operation.
The chute would take the expedition to the edge of the jungle in safety. For the rest of the way they were on their own.
For a moment, Johnnie's boots echoed alone on the walkway; then the chute rocked in a multiplying rhythm as the members of his lead element clambered out the submarine's hatch and joined him.
Three of the men carried flamethrowers—Red Section; three of them carried reload tanks for the flamethrowers—Blue Section; and the remaining three men of Green Section had quad-packs of armor-piercing rockets. Many of the men were half again Johnnie's age; all of them had vastly more experience than Johnnie did—
The block of light in Johnnie's visor was still solid green. He could have asked his helmet for a remote view from any or all the men in the lead element, but they weren't going to get lost—and the jungle ahead needed his full attention.
Johnnie paused at the edge of the chute beside Sergeant Britten; aiming his weapon—outward, not at a specific target, for there was none. He projected a compass bearing in his visor, then moved back a half step to make room for the section leader who was supposed to be immediately behind him.
"Red One," he said. Johnnie didn't know the names of the members of his section, but their military job descriptions were all that mattered now.
He indicated an arc by moving his left hand beneath the barrel of his rifle/grenade launcher combination. "Sweep twenty degrees with a three-second shot."
Red One braced himself behind the nozzle of his flamethrower, but he didn't fire. "What am I aiming at?" he asked.
"Red One, you're relieved!" Johnnie shouted. "Report to the center element for assignment. Sergeant Britten, take over Red Section."
Britten's flamethrower snarled like a dragon waking. A pencil-thin rod spat from the nozzle in a flat arc. The fuel was magnesium-enriched; its flame was almost as bright as the electrical discharge from the tree a moment before. Foliage curled and crackled as the sergeant walked his lethal torch waist-high across precisely twenty degrees in precisely three seconds.
Johnnie's helmet visor automatically blanked the high-intensity core of the flame, but the reflections—from water, leaves, and even the smooth bark of some trees—made a dazzling pattern all around him. Something screamed horribly over the roar of the flame; he wasn't sure whether it was an animal or steam escaping from the trunk of a dying tree.
The white flame and its soul-searing noise cut off. Orange sparks puffed and showered; occasionally one of them flew against the breeze in a vain attempt to escape the destruction it carried. A wide section approximately fifty yards into the jungle was either clear or too stunned to pose an immediate threat to the expedition.