by John Ringo
“No long lines,” Bruce snapped. “They’re nearly as bad as drift nets!”
“Whatever,” Edmund replied. “Tell me what you want and we’ll provide it. Within reason. You’re not the only group we have to support with arms and materials.”
“What’s within reason?” Bruce replied.
Ah, hah. “That’s to be worked out. We can provide the fighters with some weapons. The bronze is better for your purposes; it can be resharpened easily, unlike the stainless. But it’s hard to make and there are no sources of made material whereas we can get blanks, have blanks, of the stainless in quantity. But that’s hard to work as hell, it takes time which means money. We’ll set up a credit system for support and ensure solid, and honest, trade, under UFS trading laws. We’re not going to strip you of people and with our support there are products that you can trade for luxuries and that way you won’t be entirely dependent upon us. As I said, the details have to be worked out, but they are details. As willing allies in a mutual protection pact we’re not going to let you starve at the very minimum. Your mer-men and -women won’t have to scrabble for every little reef-fish they can catch. And maybe even not have to eat sushi for the rest of their lives.”
Bruce considered this for a pace and then shrugged.
“I come out here to convince you, and you half convince me,” Bruce said.
“The reef will survive, with or without you,” Edmund said. “But, here and now, the crisis is the war against New Destiny. Win the war and the reef will be waiting for you. As you yourself said, Big Greenie survived the worst that man could throw at her. She’s survived natural and unnatural disasters for seven million years. She’ll survive this. Assuming that New Destiny doesn’t throw huge power bolts into her. Another thing that we can prevent.”
Bruce shrugged again and then headed back towards the town. Edmund figured it was as good as he was going to get. For now.
* * *
Rachel pawed among the leaves and vines, her fins kicking at, and above, the water’s surface to keep her in place. She was mostly finding hard, unripe fruits among sea plum growth.
“Sea plum’s one of those ‘good-bad’ things,” Elayna said, foraging in slightly deeper water. “It’s more of a pest in the waters around Flora, but it has some really specific growing requirements.”
The bed of vines was anchored near the spring on Whale Point Drop but the vines stretched for meters in every direction.
“It interferes with the sea grasses some,” Antja said, sitting up so her head was out of the shallow water and looking around, then bobbing back down to continue to forage. “The roots have to have fresh water, but the fruits will only mature in salt. So it’s only found where there’s a strong fresh-water flow that meets salt water. That means right around spring runoffs like this one for the most part. And it only grows so far. So it’s not a terrible pest. And it supports most of the species that sea grass does, for that matter.”
“There are all sorts of little fish and… stuff in here,” Rachel said. “But not much in the way of mature plums. Elayna, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” the girl said, her bright blue tail waving out of the water as she rummaged in the vines.
“Where’s the eel?”
“Oh, I only bring Akasha out for special occasions,” Elayna said, “And generally only at night. During the day she hides in her cave. I think this bed has mostly been picked over,” she added with a sigh. “We need to go find something else. Conch? Lobster?”
“Conch is generally found around sea grass,” Antja said, looking at Rachel. “But the nearest bed is klicks away. I think we need to go bugging.”
“Bugging?” Rachel asked.
“Looking for crayfish,” Elayna said, then added: “Lobster.”
“Oh.”
“Mostly the way that we do that is to swim upstream so we can coast back,” Antja said, swimming towards the inlet’s mouth. “But we’ve been here long enough that most of the upstream stuff has been picked over like the sea plum. The lobster move around; they come in to refill the niches they hide in, but that takes a little time. So, I’d suggest heading east, if you’re up for a hard swim back?
“I think so,” Rachel replied, picking up the string-mesh bag that had a few fruit in it. “What is this made of?” she asked as she followed the two mer-girls out to sea. They were swimming slowly since she was a virtual cripple in the water but it was still a little fast for her and she was glad when they caught the current and it pushed them to the east.
“Mostly seaweed stems,” Antja said. “We make some from the sea plum, too, but if you cut the vine, you don’t get the fruit. Hard choice.”
“And both of them rot quickly,” Elayna complained. “And aren’t very strong to start with. They’re not very good.”
“This is something we can help with,” Rachel said. “I don’t know if cosilk or hemp would be best, but we have both. Not a lot, yet, but more every year as we break more ground.”
“What I’d really like is a bathing suit top,” Antja said, looking at Rachel’s two-piece. “I’m really tired of having my breasts on display all the time. There are times that I don’t like being looked at that way, if you know what I mean. I won’t even comment on the occasional touch.”
“Speak for yourself,” Elayna said happily. “I like the looks. I don’t even mind the touch, if it’s the right hands.”
“That’s because you’re a slut, Elayna,” Antja said, without rancor.
“She’s not a slut,” Rachel challenged. “She’s just… comfortable with showing off her body. But I know what you mean, Antja. Even this thing is too skimpy for me. I never really showed off, much, before the Fall. Except, you know, when I was younger…”
“Putting on as little as your mom would let you get away with and going out in public to flaunt?” Antja said with a grin.
“Oh, I’d shake it,” Rachel laughed. “But then… some of the looks I’d get. They just made me shiver, you know? And I started putting my clothes back on. Since the Fall… with… some of the things that have happened, you never catch me anymore except in long skirts or slacks and a high-buttoned shirt. I don’t want the looks. At all.”
“Well, I don’t mind them, thanks,” Elayna said. “And I’m not a slut. A slut is some girl that sleeps with any guy that crooks a finger. I’m much pickier. Now, Bast, Bast is a slut.”
“Not by your definition,” Rachel said with a laugh. “By your definition, she’s perfect. But she wouldn’t mind being called a slut; she’d probably take it as a compliment. But Bast is very choosy and as far as I can see… sort of serially monogamous. I didn’t realize it at first, but she really is. She’s never even looked at another guy since she started dating Herzer, at least not around Raven’s Mill. And, God knows, Herzer doesn’t worry about hopping from bed to bed. If you’d like a slut, Herzer’s the male definition. But Bast isn’t. Hell, she chose my father when he was not much older than Herzer and they apparently were quite an item for damned near a decade.”
“Really?” Elayna gasped. “Your dad?”
“Oh, yeah,” Rachel said with a wicked grin. “Apparently back then, Dad must have really been something. Heck, he was living with Aunt Sheida before he met my mom and that was either post Bast or concurrent; I’ve never been sure and I’m not about to ask. And then he tossed them both over for Mom. Now that must have been a spectacular breakup.”
“Aunt Sheida?” Antja said, picking up on the name. “Not the council member?”
“Yep, now Queen Sheida of the United Free States. Even back then she was number two or three on the list for a Key, and they don’t hand those out at raffles. But here Dad is bouncing from Bast to Sheida and then finally settling on Mom of all women.”
“So he’s never slept with Bast again?” Elayna said. “That’s hard to believe. She’s so…”
“Sensual,” Rachel finished the sentence. “After Mom left him, taking me along, he apparently had some time with Bast. But… I’m no
t sure what was going on there. I’d say he needed the company; he was really busted up when Mom left.”
“When was this?” Antja asked.
“When I was about four,” Rachel said, sadly, remembering the arguments vaguely as not happy times. “My dad was a really serious reenactor before the Fall. He lived in a stone house, cooked his own food, or had a nanny servant do it anyway, the whole thing. Like some feudal lord. I mean, it wasn’t crazy living; he had hot and cold running water. But it was from a cistern on the hill and that was filled from a spring. When I say cold I mean cold. Anyway, the way I pieced it together, Mom wasn’t willing to raise me like that and he wasn’t willing to leave. So he clung to his life like a limpet and… Mom made a new one. He came and lived with us for a while but he just couldn’t hack it. Technology really seems to drive him crazy if he’s living with it every day. So by the time I was six or so, he was gone for good. I’d still visit him from time to time, especially for Faire. It was great when I was a kid. Dad was the local ‘Lord’ and I’d get all dressed up and people would fuss over me. But then as I got older, it just got so… old. So I stopped going to visit him.”
“What happened?” Elayna said. “Why’d you go back?”
“Duh, the Fall, dummy,” Antja chuckled, grimly.
“Duh, indeed,” Rachel said with a frown. “Mom and I lived… hell, not that far from Raven’s Mill. No more than a hundred klicks. Do you know how hard it is to walk a hundred klicks, carrying food, in the middle of the storms they had after the Fall?”
“Yuck,” Elayna muttered.
“Yeah. But what more perfect place to go? Before the Fall it was ‘This water is like ice and why do I have to use this old-fashioned flush commode? Why don’t you just transport like any normal person, Daaadddy!’ When I got there and saw a flush commode, and a hot bath being drawn, I cried like a baby. No more squatting in bushes! No more rough flannel and cold river water! Mom…” She stopped and breathed for a moment. “Mom got first crack at the tub. But, anyway, that’s how Mom and Dad got back together. And… after a while they got back to being… friends. For a while there, it was really sickening, like two giggly teenagers. Now they’re just… well, they’re just about the most perfect couple I’ve ever seen. They discuss problems, rarely lose their temper with each other and compliment one another for what they do. And Bast, returning to the subject of the discussion, has been smart enough not to interfere. Why should she? She’s got Herzer!”
“So what about you and Herzer?” Elayna asked. “I heard you were sharing a room on the ship? Care to pass on any tips?”
“He snores,” Rachel said, sweetly. “As for the rest, Herzer’s like my brother. I… we’ve never. We’re not going to be doing that.”
“Why?” Antja asked, reasonably. “I mean, I’ve got Jason and Herzer’s got no tail to speak of, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see the attraction. Hell, you’ve only got to take one look at his bathing suit to see one attraction.”
“I did!” Elayna snickered.
“Well…” Rachel said, coloring slightly. “If… if there’s such a thing as an ‘antislut’ that’s me. That doesn’t mean I’m down on girls who enjoy bed hopping; Marguerite was one of my best friends before the Fall and she lost her virginity about the time she started blooming tits. And never looked back. But me… I’ve just never been interested.”
“You mean in guys?” Elayna asked.
“I mean in sex,” Rachel responded. “Guys or girls. I just don’t care. I like guys, and girls, as friends. But I’m not interested in… all the squishy awfulness. It sort of makes me queasy to tell you the truth.”
“That’s weird,” Elayna said. “I can’t really imagine that.”
“That’s because you’ve got a sex drive,” Rachel said with a sad frown. “I don’t. It’s like being tone-deaf. You can listen to the music, but all it is is noise. Unpleasant noise at that. The thought of… Herzer’s dick in me is… ooooh!” she ended with a shudder of disgust.
“Okay,” Antja said. “I have to agree, that’s weird.”
“Well if a normal sex drive is like a five,” Rachel said with a shrug. “And Elayna here is, say, an eight, I’m like a negative one.”
“And what’s Bast?” Elayna said.
“Three thousand one hundred and fifteen,” Rachel laughed. “More or less.”
They had drifted to an area of scattered patch reef, most of them a meter or so high, and Antja suddenly darted downward, reaching into a crevice.
“Gotcha,” she said, pulling the lobster out of its hole. It waved its antennae at her furiously and kicked with its tail but most of the motion stopped when she wrung the body off of the tail and dropped the latter into her bag.
“They generally hang out under ledges and in cracks,” Antja said, dropping down to the sand bottom to swim along the side of the section of reef. She was peering into the ledges under the rock and then darted her hand in again. This time she drew it out with an expression of disgust.
“What we need is spears for this,” she said. “It’s not particularly sporting but we’re not here for sport.”
Rachel coasted a little farther down and picked out her own patch of rock. She got down on the sand and looked under the reef but it was nearly black to her eyes. The sun was high and shining down through the water as if the ten meters or so over her head wasn’t even there. And the shadows under the rock were nearly impenetrable. But she could see stuff on the sides, little fish darting in and out. Then she saw a shadow move under the rock and backed up in a hurry as a small shark came sculling out lazily. At least, she thought it was a shark. It looked a little like one except that the mouth was pursed as if it had been eating a lemon.
“Nurse shark,” Elayna said as she swam by. “They’re harmless if you don’t bother them. On the other hand, they’ll tear you a new one if you do. A guy before the Fall, a mer and he should have known better, tried to ride one. Fortunately the nannites fixed him right up. But he Changed back to normal human and never got in the water again.”
“How do you see under here?” Rachel said. She had changed patches and was now looking under the new rock, warily.
“You get used to it,” Antja said, drifting past. She now had three lobster tails in her bag, one of which was huge. “Watch them, though, they’ve got spines. You have to grip them firmly but not hard. Firmly enough that they can’t get away; they’ll rip you up struggling out of your hand. But don’t grab them so hard that you poke yourself.”
“Great,” Rachel said, catching a glimpse of some antennae waving just down the reef. She pushed herself off the bottom with her fingers and snuck up on the crayfish. It was apparently unworried about her approach, except for waving its antennae more aggressively. She moved her hand in closer and then lunged. She wasn’t quite fast enough, but she got ahold of the antennae at the base, surprised by the struggle the lobster was putting up. She managed to get her other hand around it and then wrung the tail off quickly.
“Got one,” she said, happily. Then noticed the small cuts in the fingers that had snagged the antennae. The salt water stung them but there wasn’t much she could do about that.
“Gloves,” Elayna said, popping up from a section of reef about ten meters away. “That’s what we really need: Gloves.”
“Not if you use a spear,” Antja said. She was out of sight, only her golden-red tail sticking up out of the reef. The colors only really came out when they were close to the surface.
“Why do you guys all have colorful tails when the water makes them all look brown or green at depth?” Rachel asked, going back to her hunting.
“Our eyes process out the blue light,” Antja replied, then paused as she apparently lunged for another lobster. “Until we get deep and that’s all there is. But when we’re at, say, twenty meters, we see things just as clearly, color-wise, as you do up here. But by the time you get down to say, thirty or forty meters, it kicks back over to ‘normal’ vision because just about everything bu
t blue has gone away.”
“Is it harder for you to see?” Rachel asked. “I mean, down by the town and stuff. Everything down there is blue.”
“No,” Elayna replied. “We’ve got superior night vision, too. Kind of like a cat. We can probably see better than you can. That might be why we can see under the rocks better, too.”
“I see this one,” Rachel said, darting in and getting ahold of the body this time. She’d figured out her grip and didn’t get cut for her troubles, but her hand scraped on the rock as she drew the struggling crustacean out. She also realized that she was tired. And there was a long swim back against the current. “This isn’t easy.”
“No, it’s not,” Antja said. “I’m not sure we’re getting more calories than we’re going to burn off, especially with having to swim back against the current carrying the tails.”
Rachel thought about that and then laughed.
“I’ll carry them back,” she said, spotting another lobster. “I can walk up on the shore. That way you guys don’t have to wait for me to catch up.”
“Works,” Elayna said. “But we can keep in the shallows, that way you’ll have company. That way you can tell me all of Herzer’s terrible secrets.”
“I think those are Herzer’s to tell,” Rachel said, pausing in her hunt.
“Oh, that’s no fun,” Elayna replied.
“Well, most of Herzer’s life before the Fall doesn’t contain many terrible secrets,” Rachel replied as her hand darted in and just missed the more wary crayfish. It had been a large one, too. “He had a genetic condition that my mom cured, just before the Fall, fortunately. It got worse as he got older and especially worse around puberty. He… didn’t have many friends and no girlfriends to speak of.”
“That’s pretty unbelievable,” Antja said. Her bag was nearly full and she rested on the top of the reef for a moment. Rachel suddenly realized that the scales on their tails had more than decorative purposes; if she had tried that, with the mild swell that was pushing over the rocks, she would have come away with a scraped-raw butt.