by David Drake
He shrugged. "The read-out says there's nothing so big we can't patch it. Eyeballing the skirts from up here on deck, it looks the same. Lotta little holes, one maybe from a six-inch—but just the hole, it didn't go off. Maybe we get down inside the chamber, there'll be a problem after all. But I don't see bloody why there oughta be."
Caffey, back in the cockpit studying the holographic display Brainard had called up, nodded. "Get rid of the eel, run patching film around the plenum chamber—and we're golden. We can sail the sucker home."
"Then why," said Brainard, "didn't K44's crew do that? They must've known that with their ascender gear shot off, nobody was going to pick up their distress calls more than a few miles away."
His eyes glazed with the vision of spike-thorned honeysuckle, toppling toward him to drain his blood. "Why did they stay here to d-d-die?"
Nobody spoke for a moment. Officer-Trainee Wilding put his hand on Brainard's arm.
"Sir," Wilding said, "I don't think you can understand, because you've never been afraid. But they were just normal men, Holman and his crew. Maybe there wasn't an eel in the plenum chamber, not at first. But something was—crabs, bloodworms. Or it might have been."
"Down there, it gets darker 'n a yard up a hog's ass," Leaf said soberly. "And nobody was gonna risk his life because a chickenshit like Ted Holman told him t' do it."
"Don't tell me about being afraid," Brainard whispered.
A column of spike-thorned honeysuckle toppling forward to drink. . . .
"Right," he said. "We need to bait the eel into the open."
He put his rifle on the deck and bent to unfasten his boots. Boots and trousers would drag in the water, slowing him down.
"Caffey and Wheelwright, you'll hold my left wrist and haul me back aboard when Mr Wilding gives the order," Brainard went on. "Leaf and Newton, you're on my right. Mr Wilding, you'll be in charge of the operation—"
The ensign kicked off one boot, then the other. He was afraid to order anybody else to do what had to be done. Ulcers on Brainard's insteps had leaked blood and serum, gluing his socks to his feet.
"—and you'll throw the grenade. Are you up to that?"
"Look, sir," said the motorman, "I can—"
"Shut up," said Brainard. "Are you up to that duty, Mr Wilding?"
The officer-trainee licked his lips. "Yes sir," he said. "Ah, we'll want to—be—here at the stern, as far from the eel's tunnel as we can get."
"Yes," said Brainard. "Yes, of course."
He pulled off his trousers, moving stiffly because of fatigue and injuries . . . and fear.
"Then let's get on with it, shall we?" he said.
Before the jaws of the moray eel in his mind closed and crushed him into a trembling fetal ball.
* * *
December 14, 380 AS. 0655 hours.
Brainard and four other youths sat in a circle on the Commons of Iowa Keep, drinking and viewing air-projection holograms.
Commuters watched as they rode to work on the slidewalks surrounding the Commons. There wasn't much entertainment in the gathering, but the youths at least showed some life. They were a relief from the backs of other workers going to empty jobs—or the pensioners hunched on benches beneath the elms, waiting for their empty lives to end.
"See, Brainard?" Rufus said. "It's past time already. They decided they didn't want you—so let's go home, huh?"
He swigged and offered Brainard the bottle. Its original contents had been replaced with a sweet punch made from fruit juice and industrial alcohol.
Brainard waved the bottle away. He looked at the clock on a pole in the middle of the Commons.
"It's not time," he snapped. He was angry that Rufus's gibe took him in for a moment. "Anyway, a few minutes aren't a big deal. Since when did you ever get to your first class on time?"
"We're here now, Brainard, baby," Kohl said in a lugubrious voice. "Seeing our buddy off. Pallbearers at your funeral, that's what we are."
"If he doesn't come to his senses," said Price. "Hey Rufe? Pass me the bottle if soldier boy doesn't want it."
"Hey, look at this one," Lilly said as he switched the chip in his hologram projector.
The image of a tracked vehicle seared the jungle with a rod of flame. As soon as the flamethrower shut off, two armored bulldozers snarled in to clear the gap before it could regrow. Despite the bath of fire, vines lifted and slashed until the dozer blades or crushing treads managed to sever them.
One of the bulldozers broke through the vines into a fifty-foot circle of sand. The driver started to back away. The surface lurched. The bulldozer sank to the top of its treads.
A armored recovery vehicle roared to life. Its path was blocked by the self-propelled plows which tore through the surface layers behind the bulldozers and injected herbicides into the cuts.
The stricken bulldozer lurched again and tilted forward. The engine compartment sank completely beneath the surface. The treads still rotated in reverse, but they could not bite on the loose sand.
The hatch at the rear of the cab flew open. The driver climbed onto the mounting ladder and poised there. Firm ground was twenty feet away.
The bulldozer shuddered. It began to slide downward as swiftly as a submarine which has vented its ballast. Two jointed, hairy arms as thick as treetrunks reached up from the center of the clearing and pulled the vehicle deeper.
The driver leaped desperately. He landed on the agitated sand. As the bulldozer slipped beneath the surface, its turbulence dragged the man along with it.
The image went blank. Lilly put another chip into the projector. "And that's just land-clearing!" he said gleefully. "You're gonna have people shooting at you besides!"
He'd lifted the chips from the library of Iowa Technical School, where he was completing work in biology. In a year, Lilly would sit glassy-eyed in a chair while his computer plotted plankton patterns onto charts—
Which might be transmitted to the netters—
Which would ignore the charts in favor of continuing their plodding progress across the fishing grounds, stolid in the certainty that any slight gains would be offset by time lost in departing from the preset pattern.
All five of the youths were students . . . except for Rufus and for Brainard, who had just received their two-year degrees.
Brainard swallowed and looked across the slidewalk to the recruiting office. It was still closed, a massively-armored portal as forbidding as a bank vault. Mercenary recruiters were frequent targets of mob violence, both because of what they were and because they were different from the normal round of life in the keeps.
For that matter, the mob didn't need much of a reason to riot.
"Here's one for you, Brainard," Lilly said as he loaded another chip. "Take a look at this!"
Some Free Companies maintained recruiting offices in one or two of the Keeps by whom those companies were frequently hired. Wysocki's Herd, the Seatigers, and the Battlestars shared choice locations on a rotating basis in more than a dozen of the undersea domes. This technique spread the three companies' recruiting base and advertised their wares to the upper levels of keep society: the men who made decisions on war, peace, and hiring.
Brainard thought the recruiter for Wysocki's Herd was on duty in Iowa Keep this week, but he wasn't sure.
And it didn't really matter.
"Back in the Settlement Period, they planned to colonize the surface," said Kline, the other biotechnician. "Nothing came of it."
"Earth came of it," Kohl snorted. "People blowing themselves all up. Hey Rufe—how about some more of that punch."
"Hey, you guys. Look at this. It's a neat one."
"Dead soldier," said Rufus, turning the bottle upside down. The drop that formed on the rim did not fall.
"We got beer left in the cooler," Kohl offered. He spun the lid open.
The hologram hanging above the middle of the circle was of a lifeboat, bright yellow and seemingly empty. It bobbed as the sea's glassy surface swelled slowly
, then subsided. The boat's image enlarged as the camera closed in.
"That didn't really affect things," Kline said. "The Holocaust, I mean. The surface colonies were supposed to be sent from the Keeps, not Earth. They just weren't. Too big an effort, I guess."
The lifeboat filled the holographic field. The camera was positioned above the little vessel, looking straight down. It seemed to be empty until the cameraman increased magnification still further.
A few quarts of water sloshed in the lifeboat's bilges. Tiny toothed things flashed and quivered there. They were fighting over the disarticulated bones of a human hand.
"C'mon, Brainard," Kohl said. "Have a beer at least. Keep your strength up."
Rufus chuckled. "The condemned man drank a hearty meal," he said.
"Want to see what happens when stinging nettles get through a Free Company's perimeter?" Lilly said with enthusiasm as he changed chips.
A tall, fit-looking man in a blue-and-silver uniform stepped off the slidewalk in front of the recruiting office. His exposed skin had the mahogany tan of surface radiation. He reached toward the door with a chip-coded key in his hand.
Brainard stood up.
"Aw, c'mon, Brainard," said Rufus as he struggled to rise also. "You don't really wanna do this."
When the mercenary saw the group of young men, he shifted the key to his left hand and did not unlock the door. "Yes?" he called across the slidewalk.
His right hand hovered at waist level, almost innocently. His little finger carefully teased open the flap of the pistol holster which completed his uniform.
"I've come to enlist," Brainard said loudly as he strode toward the slidewalk.
"Aw, Brainard," Kohl muttered.
A professional smile brightened the recruiter's face. "Then you've come to the right place," he said as he reached toward the door again.
"And why spend the effort to die on the surface?" said Kline rhetorically as he sucked on the bottle he had already emptied. "Life in the Keeps is just fine the way it is!"
The slidewalk carried Brainard sideways, though he crossed it in two quick strides. He walked back along the berm.
In the center of Iowa Keep and every other domed city beneath the seas of Venus was the Earth Memorial. An image of Mankind's home blazed, representing the white light of the self-sustaining silicon reaction in the rocks of the actual planet. A wreath of black crepe encircled the display.
The armored doors of the recruiting office spread before Brainard like the jaws of death.
19
May 18, 382 AS. 1125 hours.
Wilding hallucinated.
He sensed his environment as if every detail were engraved in crystal. He had infinite time to pore over his surroundings and rotate them through his viewpoint.
Pores on Brainard's cold face as the ensign knelt with his back to the water.
Pressure blotches where the enlisted men gripped Brainard, four scarred hands holding each of his.
Individual scales jeweling the sides of fish. Sunlight shone through clouds and clear water to turn fanged horrors into things of miniature beauty.
Wisps of sand drifting in vortices near the mouth of the tunnel fifty feet away, marking movements of the monster within the plenum chamber.
"Right," said Brainard. "Is everybody ready?"
Yessir/Yeah/Uh-huh/Yessir
A wide variety of syllables, timbres, volume—and it all had the same meaning. You are willing to die for us, so we will stand by you. A computer would not understand, but men understood.
Hal Wilding understood for the first time how Nature ordered the jungle—and what it meant to be a man.
"Mr Wilding," said Brainard. His voice trembled minusculely with fear and anticipation. "Are you ready?"
Wilding nodded. "I'm ready," his voice said. His mind marveled at the precise normality of the words. "I understand."
Doubt flecked the corners of Brainard's eyes, briefly there—and gone. No use worrying, and no time for it either.
"All right," the ensign said. "I'm going in." He lurched backward into the glassy water.
Large fish swirled shadows at the limits of visibility. They were drawn by sound and movement aboard the hovercraft, but they sensed also the huge moray which laired beneath the vessel. They would not attack—unless enough blood scented the water to overwhelm their instinct for self-preservation with the desire to kill.
Crabs marched closer in the shallows. Their legs stirred the fine sand of the bottom into a smoky ambiance through which the flat, spike-armored carapaces drifted sideways. The crabs' outstretched fighting claws scissored open and closed, for the moment cutting only water.
The moray's tunnel was still and dark. The hovercraft shivered as a slimy body brushed its underside.
Ensign Brainard kicked, stirring the surface.
The four enlisted men looked more like corpses than they did able-bodied humans. The cuts, scrapes and sores that covered their bodies were individually minor, but the cumulative effect would have sapped the will of the strongest of men. Their faces were stark. They knew that they would have to pull their commander out of the water more swiftly than the moray could strike; and all of them doubted their ability to succeed.
"Has the eel . . . ," Brainard asked, pausing to kick again. His exhausted muscles trembled with the effort of keeping his head out of water, but his eyes were indomitable. " . . . shown itself?"
"It's moving inside the plenum chamber," Wilding said. His tone was calm, soothing. He was a part of Nature. "It'll come soon."
All of their clothing was in rags. Leaf knelt beside the officer-trainee. His feet were turned outward. The soles of his seaboots were a synthetic which combined a gummy grip with the toughness of mild steel and stability at temperatures up to 880o.
A purple fungus had devoured half the thickness of the right sole and was sucking a dimple from the heel of the left boot as well.
"Do you know what we're fighting for?" Wilding asked softly.
A twenty-foot shark curled in toward the hovercraft. A rifle on the deck beside Wilding pointed out over the sea. He knew the weapon was unnecessary at the moment.
The shark banked and fled toward the safety of its distant fellows, showing its pale belly. Its pectoral fins were spread like wings.
"For our lives, you bloody fool!" Leaf gasped. "That's what we're fighting for!"
Sweat blinded the motorman. He was desperately afraid that the sweat sliming his palms would cause his hands to slip when Ensign Brainard's life depended on him.
"No," explained Wilding, "that isn't why we're still fighting, still here."
His fingertips knew the surface of the grenade. On the deck lay the safety pin. The grenade's spoon handle pressed upward against Wilding's palm, straining to ignite the fuze train. The safety pin could be reinserted if the moray refused the bait . . . but Wilding knew that the beast would come.
Soon.
"Any one of us would have given up long ago if he'd been alone," he said aloud. "Even you, sir. Even you."
It was a wonder the way his tongue shaped to the words.
"For God's sake, man!" Caffey snarled. "Are you watching for the fucking eel?"
"I'm ready," Wilding said. "I understand."
Brainard's face lifted toward the officer-trainee. The ensign's face showed no concern; no expectation, even. Only the physical strain of making his wracked muscles kick the water to bring the jaws of a multi-ton monster down on him. . . .
Miniature fish darted in and out, confused by the thrashing. One of them snatched at the pus-soaked fabric of Brainard's sock. The scavenger's jaws stayed clamped although a kick lifted it from the water. When the fish splashed down again, one of its fellows sheared through its body just behind the head.
The torpedoman muttered a curse or a prayer.
"We're fighting for each other," Wilding said. "That's good, but it's not good enough. When we get back, we have to fight for all Mankind."
The crabs scurried away li
ke a mob fleeing a madman with an axe when Brainard started to kick. They resumed their sidelong advance, each moving individually but marching in lock-step because identical imperatives ruled their rudimentary minds.
The crustaceans pulsed forward and dashed back; but a little closer with every cycle. Soon one of them would spring from the sea floor with its claws wide to seize the man in the water. . . .
"Otherwise we're part of the jungle," Wilding said. "And the jungle will win."
"Oh God!" Leaf cried in despair. "I can't hold—"
It was the moment.
"Now!" shouted the officer-trainee. As the word came from his mouth, electric motion slid out of the tunnel.
The moray was green. Its jaws were open. The ragged fangs were up to ten inches long.
The sharks and lesser fish at the edge of vision vanished. The ranked crabs exploded backward behind a curtain of sand, tumbling over one another in their haste to escape nemesis.
The moray struck through the sea more swiftly than gravity could have pulled a boulder in thin air. The undulant movement slapped water violently against the hovercraft.
The grenade left Wilding's fingers as if it were playing its part in a marionette show in which strings connected all existence.
"Hah!" shouted one of the enlisted men as the four straightened and lunged backward in unison. Ensign Brainard lifted toward the shell-torn gap in K44's railing.
Brainard was still in the air. His head and shoulders were over the deck, but his legs flailed above the sea.
The moray's head slid out of the water. Its palate was a cottony white. Leaf threw himself forward to block the monster's spearpoint teeth with his body. Wilding knew what was about to happen. He held the motorman's shoulders with the strength of a madman.
The grenade went off in the moray's throat. The creature's head flew apart. The thick slime coating its body was bright yellow, and the scales beneath were blue.
The spray of the moray's blood in the air was red, and the spreading red blur in Wilding's mind overwhelmed his consciousness.