Vinnie cursed and dashed after her, reaching out to pull her back by the harness of her Terran Navy webbing belt. But it broke, the fabric having rotted away in just the few days of exposure. Mazith floundered on.
In the air lock, the man waved again but he also rose up, feet dangling, a huge pink spore mass suddenly visible behind him. Fungal creepers ran beneath the man’s feet and splashed out into the water, racing toward Mazith with frightening speed.
Kelvin and Vinnie fired together, heat-beams sizzling over Mazith’s head as they targeted the spore body in the air lock and its human puppet. But unlike most Venusian fungi the thing didn’t burst into flames. The pencil-thin beams just drilled smoking, blackened holes and more and more spore creepers kept spewing from it, the leading ones rushing toward the frantically reversing Mazith.
She only made it a few meters back before they latched on to her, drilling through lizard-skin and artificial fibers and straight through skin, following blood vessels and nerves and muscles, holding her upright as she screamed. Then she stopped screaming, and her arms lifted up and down, as if the fungus was testing its control of its new puppet.
“Back and sweep,” ordered Vinnie tersely, firing in broad arcs across the water only ten meters ahead, trying to stop the creepers. Kelvin followed suit, backing and shooting and swearing, but the creepers were going wide and there were so many of them, dozens and dozens of tendrils that would encircle them both in a matter of seconds, and Theodore and the frogsled too—
Something erupted from the water just behind Kelvin. He began to turn, and it smashed into him and pushed him deep underwater. Panicking, he reached up to claw his way to the surface—and everything above went white, the white of utmost brilliance that marked the detonation of a tactical plasma grenade.
Even facedown under a meter of dirty water and wearing goggles, Kelvin was blinded for a few seconds. He thrashed and fought in dark fear as something dragged him out of the water, till he realized it was a human hand and not fungal tendrils about to bore into his flesh.
“Brace your feet!”
Kelvin dug his feet in and leaned back as water rushed around him. His vision cleared, apart from some dancing spots of darkness. He briefly saw a deep, smoking crater between himself and the Jumping Jehosophat, before it was once again filled as the waters rushed back in. Theodore was whipping his frogs into a frenzy of paddling and jumping to keep the sled from being sucked back, while Vinnie was bulling her way against the current toward him and the woman who was still holding him up.
“A hit, a very palpable hit,” muttered Kelvin, shivering. Not from cold, for it was as warm as ever, the water still steaming and boiling twenty meters away, the final aftereffects of the grenade.
There was nothing left of Lieutenant Mazith and the fungus tendrils. She might never have existed at all.
“Never seen anything like that puppeteer,” said Jat, slotting the snout of the Mark XXII Plasma Grenade projector over her back into its harness, the whine of its protective shield generator slowly fading as the weapon went into standby mode. She was an Oscar Goodson clone, small and wiry, and apart from the grenade-launcher harness and several other weapons, she wore only a kind of lizard-skin swimsuit, and the rest of her body, face and hairless scalp included, was covered in swamp lichen grown in a splinter pattern mimicking ASAP Terran equatorial jungle camouflage. A particularly large frog paddled placidly in a circle behind her, trailing a rig rather like the travois of the Plains Indians of Earth. “You reckon there’s more inside?”
Kelvin spat out some water, rinsed his goggles, and took a look at the air lock. The plasma blast had scoured out the air lock and the fungal mass that he’d seen there, doubtless along with all the electronics and who knew what else. They’d be lucky if they could get it to close manually now. But he wasn’t particularly worried about that. The thought of more puppeteer fungus was of much more immediate concern.
“Probably not,” called out Theodore. “I’ve seen them puppeteers before. Single spore body always, no groups or clusters. They always keep one life-form to use as a decoy and absorb the rest. Interesting fellers.”
“ ‘Probably not’ doesn’t sound all that convincing,” said Kelvin. He looked at his watch. “Forty-eight minutes.”
“Shit,” said Vinnie, raising her heat-beam. Kelvin’s head flashed up. There was another jerking, twisting figure in the air lock, another puppet raised by the bright pink threads of the fungus behind it.
“Turn and brace!” ordered Jat tersely, unlimbering the launcher. Kelvin felt a crawling sensation across his skin as the force shield extended outward. He had already spun about and was hunching down, with his eyes closed, when the second grenade went off.
A minute later he was blinking and hopping backward to avoid a stream of very hot water that had rushed past as the shield came down. The launcher’s power pack could only maintain the shield for two or three seconds, to protect a squad from the initial blast. It wasn’t designed for the aftereffects of detonation close to water.
The yacht’s air lock was now definitely out of operation, the outer door hanging at a slight angle, scorch marks and pockmarks of melted alloy visible on the inside.
“So what are the chances of there being more than two?” asked Jat.
Vinnie shrugged and looked at Kelvin.
“Too risky to go in,” she said. “We’d better hightail it out of here with Theodore.”
“I guess so,” said Kelvin heavily. He looked up at the clouds above, visualizing the sky beyond and the missiles that would be streaking in sometime in the next thirty-eight minutes or thereabouts. “What about if I go in? The ship’s been venerified; they’ll have a deluge system of antifungals operated from the bridge.”
“You’d have to get to the bridge, and you know most of those antifungals aren’t worth shit for the stuff out here,” said Vinnie.
“I’ll go have a look,” said Theodore. He got off his sled and started to wade ahead toward the ship. He didn’t bother drawing his heat-beam.
“Hey!” called out Vinnie. “Wait up!”
“Lot of the local fungi leave me alone,” called out Theodore. “I’ll have a look around. If I’m not back in five minutes, help yourself to the sled.”
He gingerly tested the half-melted lip of the air lock but it had already cooled enough, so he hauled himself aboard, disappearing inside.
“I fucking hate Venus sometimes,” said Kelvin.
“It is what it is,” replied Jat with a shrug. “You got to admit, it’s an improvement on Mars.”
“Anything is an improvement on Mars,” said Kelvin. He looked at his watch again. “Anyone know the exact kill radius of whatever Terran Navy uses for tac nukes these days?”
“Got to be five kays each warhead, and they’ll overlap a bunch,” said Jat. “Also, the Roar will deflect them some, so the spread will be uneven. We could get lucky.”
“I haven’t noticed a lot of luck in the last little while,” said Kelvin.
“So we’re due some,” said Vinnie. “Quit with the whining.”
“I wasn’t whining,” protested Kelvin. “Just pointing out a fact.”
“Movement,” said Jat, raising the grenade launcher. “I only got one shot left with this, by the way.”
“It’s Theodore …” said Kelvin. The Leper appeared in the air lock, but there was something strange … he was holding up a bluish figure that might be another differently colored puppeteer or something equally dangerous …
“Hold your fire till my command,” ordered Vinnie tersely.
“It’s all clear!” called out the Leper. “A few minor things growing here and there, nothing serious.”
He lifted the blue-encrusted shape, which moved of its own accord a little, revealing a head and limbs.
“This is Jezeth! The triplet, Mazith’s ‘little sister,’ ” he called. “She escaped the puppeteer but has what we call the blue blanket. I’ll have to take her with me, she’ll die under any Terra
n treatment.”
“I thought Lepers had to volunteer!” called out Vinnie.
Theodore gave his strange, rippling shrug.
“You could say she has,” he said. “The blue blanket hasn’t killed her, and she’ll come back to consciousness and a good life in time, I would say.”
Kelvin looked at his watch. Thirty-four minutes.
“We have to take off and get the word out,” he said.
“I don’t think I can just leave that girl with Theodore,” said Vinnie. She looked at Jat, who nodded. “You take the ship up, Kel. We’ll go with Theodore.”
“You sure?” asked Kelvin.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” said Vinnie. “To tell you the truth I was never keen on leaving the planet anyway. I haven’t been off Venus since we were demobbed. I guess the place has grown on me.”
Kelvin didn’t laugh at the old joke.
“Take care, then,” he said, giving her a quick one-armed hug. “I’ll do my best to make sure the Rotarua doesn’t launch anything. I’ll get the rescue story out.”
“Here,” said Jat, handing over a flame pistol, the bigger military version of the heat-beams Kelvin and Vinnie carried. “You never know; Theodore might have missed something.”
Kelvin took the weapon and made as if to hug Jat as well. She ducked under his arm in a lightning move and punched him very lightly on the side of the head, which for Jat was pretty much an extreme show of affection.
Theodore carried the girl out of the air lock, lifting her high as he waded over to the waiting frogsled. Kelvin raised a hand as he passed, but not too close.
“Thanks, Theodore,” he said. “Stay leprous.”
As Kelvin expected, the outer door of the air lock wouldn’t shut under power and he didn’t have time to wrestle with the hydraulic system. The inner door did shut, however, and he closed every hatch behind him as he made his way cautiously to the bridge, flame pistol ready. There were patches of mold all over the place, but nothing that moved, sent out tendrils, blew spores into the air, or otherwise seemed immediately inimical.
The bridge was sealed, which was good and bad. Good because it meant it should be relatively unaffected by anything Venusian and bad because it took Kelvin five minutes of his precious time to circumvent the security lockout using old military override codes that, as he had hoped, were grandfathered into the ship’s operating system.
The bridge was fungus-free. Lights winked here and there, indicating the presence of standby power and dormant systems, another sign that the landing had been much more successful than it deserved to be. Kelvin hurried forward past the rear seats for the nonexistent bridge crew, checked the command pilot’s chair to make sure there wasn’t anything nasty waiting in its highly padded interior, and sat down, his hand sliding easily into the authorization glove. This was the real test.
A holographic screen flickered in the space in front of his eyes.
“Commander Kelvin Kelvin 21, Terran Navy, assuming emergency command in potential disaster situation,” rasped Kelvin. He felt the slight prick of the sampler. The screen flashed amber, then red, then finally the green of acceptance. Other holographic screens blinked into bright existence, the authorization glove slid away and a control stick rose up under his hand.
Kelvin scanned the screens. The layout was familiar enough. There were various small malfunctions, a couple of big ones like the open exterior air lock, but on the whole he thought he could raise ship. The lifting fans in the wings were out of the water, and as the whole craft had been venerified, should work even if they weren’t. The nose was probably dug into the mud a bit, but he could tilt his wings and edge backward and up.
He looked at his watch. Twenty-nine minutes.
Ignoring the holographic interface and its complicated expert system-ruled procedures that would take too long, he twisted open the emergency catches, folding down the direct control panel with its heavy-duty switches and dials. Lights lit up on the panel as he turned the switches. The ship shuddered as the power plant shifted from standby to ready use. The lifting fans began to slowly whir in the wings, telltales indicating that they were a bit bent up but still within the margins of military tolerance. The expert system would have shut them down immediately, of course.
Kelvin flicked an icon on the holograph and it wiped blank, then refreshed to show a panning view of the exterior. There were clouds of vapor coming off the wings, probably just churned up swamp water. He could just make out the frogsled, leaping into the distance, Jat’s big frog its close companion.
Twenty-five minutes.
Kelvin ran over his mental checklist, flicking a few more switches. The lifting fans were slowly gathering speed. He had to push them ahead slowly, carefully watching the telltales, ready to shut down a fan if there was a problem. He could take off on two of the four fans, but not if one of them exploded and destroyed the wing.
What else? He got out of his seat and looked behind it, detaching the case with its emergency vacuum suit. He put it on but didn’t expand the concertina-like soft helmet, setting it on the copilot’s seat. Then he went to look at his watch, realized it was under the suit, and took a valuable thirty seconds to unseal at the wrist and strap the watch on the outside.
Twenty-two minutes.
“Plenty of time,” muttered Kelvin to himself. “I could make a martini. If I had the makings.”
He looked around again, and saw the bright green handle of the antifungal deluge system. Kelvin reached up and turned it to the right, a red-bordered holograph flicking up to offer numerous warnings, the most significant one being that no one could breathe the stuff that would be misted through every possible part of the ship.
Kelvin turned it to the right again and pulled it down. A Klaxon sounded a strident warning, very loud on the bridge. He sat back in his command chair and reached across for the emergency-suit helmet. Pushing it open, he fixed it over his head before connecting the external air supply. Then very deliberately he fastened his harness, double-checking every connection and point of attachment.
A yellow mist fell around him as he called up the weather radar, one small segment of the massive swirling storm of the Roar completely dominating the whole display. He looked at the airspeeds, rotating and moving the model across and up and down, his mind instinctively gauging how he would approach it, use it to lift him up, and when he was high enough, come slingshoting out of it and fire off the booster that would take the ship into orbit.
Eighteen minutes.
Kelvin’s fingers twitched. The lifting fans howled. There was a horrible creaking, sucking sound as the ship lurched backward and upward. The crash screen over the forward viewports slid back as the nose came out of the swamp, but Kelvin hardly bothered to look. He was feeling every motion of the ship, every small vibration, watching the telltales for the power plant, the fans, the control surfaces.
He fed more power to the fans. The ship rose higher. Several audio alerts sounded, squawking about ground proximity and the open air lock and a dozen other things. Kelvin ignored them. One fan was running ragged, drawing too much power and providing little lift. He shut it down and flew on the remaining three, now tilting them forward a little, the ship climbing up in a corkscrew. But he couldn’t keep it up all the way in the eye; there wasn’t enough room, and the fans couldn’t provide vertical lift for more than a thousand meters.
He had to go into the Roar. At exactly the right angle of attack.
The time was forgotten now, the closing cruiser on its attack run, his clone sister and friends trying to escape below. Kelvin’s whole being was with the ship and the great storm, his mind and body remembering lessons learned from the terrible ascents out of the battlefield on Mars, climbing through the raging dust storms that spun as fast as the Roar, with enemy ordnance exploding all around, in ships worse damaged than this one, crowded with the dead and dying, the bridge itself packed so close he could barely move his elbows out and knowing that even if they made it, he’d have to go ba
ck down again …
The ship shuddered violently and pitched up, Kelvin correcting, tweaking, using all his skill to ease into the windstream. Clouds whisked past the viewports, so fast they were like flickers of shadow. There were more audible warnings, more amber- and red-bordered holographs glaring near his face.
The control stick shuddered under his hand and the ship rocked violently. The fans were tilted right back now for horizontal flight, but the number three fan wouldn’t stay in that position. Kelvin shut it down, hesitated for a moment, hit two more switches, and pulled the short lever that emerged from the panel. A few seconds later, there was a deafening crack from somewhere aft and the ship jerked sideways. Kelvin’s left hand flew across holographic controls and manual switches, as he flew with his right hand tight on the stick. The ship would not come level, but it still answered, was still climbing with the storm.
A schematic flashed red in Kelvin’s peripheral vision. He glanced at it, seeing a hole where the number three fan used to be. He’d ejected it perhaps a second before it exploded, only just in time to save the wing, while still sustaining some damage.
The Jumping Jehosophat on two of four fans was only marginally controllable in the storm. Sweat poured down Kelvin’s face under his helmet, no matter how high he dialed up the air circulating through the suit. Though he was only handling a tiny control stick, flicking holographs and turning smooth manual switches, his arms felt like he’d been carrying heavy cargo under high gravity for hours.
In a moment, he would have to slingshot out, but if he did it even slightly at the wrong angle or the wrong speed, the ship would be torn apart, the mangled pieces being strewn widely over the Venusian swampscape.
And without him to alert Venus to their presence, the Rotarua would undoubtedly fire on the last known position of their errant telepathic communicators, and that would very likely take out Vinnie, Jat, Theodore, and the poor girl under the blanket of blue mold.
The moment came. Kelvin took it, without any preparatory calculations or consultation of the ship’s systems. He instinctively absorbed all the data on the screens in front of him, he felt the vibration, he sensed the speed, direction, and possibility.
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