Supper, as well as breakfast and dinner, were the dense ration bars packed in each man’s survival pack. Each, barely two bites, and that if one were dainty about it, was said to be a full meal. The crew swore the makers had gotten there by replacing all the flavor with solids from the recyclers of a ship that’d sat as a prison hulk for no less than a decade. They were filling, though, despite the small size — one just had to be sure to not drink too much after. The things seemed to expand once eaten and given too much moisture they’d bloat and distend one’s stomach in a disturbing manner — until it came time for them to exit, which was a different sort of disturbing altogether.
It was a wonder of the Navy’s ingenuity that they’d created something to make a crew yearn for their shipboard meals of vat-grown beef.
Isom raised one of the bars to his lips and nibbled at it. He chewed slowly and Alexis could see how the motion pained him.
The blanket over his midsection stirred and for a moment Alexis worried that he might have made the mistake of eating two of the bars, but a soft chitter told her it was only the Vile Creature and not Isom’s insides.
The Creature’s head, covered in brownish fur, poked out from under the blanket and its dark, dead, beady eyes met hers.
“At least Boots is fine as can be,” Isom said.
“Indeed.”
Alexis glared at the mongoose, given to her by Avrel Dansby, a rather notorious rogue, after their adventures together, as a sort of joke. She’d have disposed of the thing out an airlock if it weren’t for her crews’ inexplicable liking of the dirty beast.
The Creature met her gaze levelly, then seemed to dismiss her and rubbed its cheek against Isom’s chest. The clerk raised his free hand to gently stroke its fur.
“He’s a comfort, he is,” Isom said. “Rode with me the whole walk so far.”
Alexis grunted. She’d been hoping, when they opened the Creature’s pressure cage back at the boat, that the thing might run off into Erzurum’s forests never to be seen again. Perhaps Creasy, Mongoose’s superstitious signalsman, could create a legend about it haunting the planet’s swamps, as he had aboard ship with his talk of spirits in the Dark and the Creature’s strange involvement in things.
Or I could send it back to Dansby as a sort of recompense for losing Mongoose, Alexis thought. It would be a poor trade, but serve the rogue right for saddling her with it in the first place.
“How do the others fare, sir?” Isom asked.
He was asking about the other boats from Mongoose, she knew, as he could see their little group well enough for himself. Their other boats and those of the other private ships — which she, Isom, and the rest of her band were now quite dependent on for getting them out of this mess.
“Mister Dockett has a man stringing an antenna up that tree as we speak, Isom, so I’ll know soon enough.”
There was not very much to hear from their radio, even with the better reception provided by the long antenna, than there had been back at the crash site.
A bit of a fight was still going on at the planet’s main town, more an occasional skirmish than anything else — that against three boats of Scorpion’s crew — but the rest had settled into an uneasy peace.
The private ships’ crews didn’t have enough men or boats to expand from their original targets against the forces of the pirates and settlers, while the pirates were spread thin keeping the attacking forces pinned down.
The lull had freed up additional boats for the pirates to search for Alexis and her band, though, and she followed that talk with interest. Luckily none were very well equipped and keeping her lads in their masking tents and blankets for the night would suffice.
Her one fear was that the pirates would put together a large enough force of men to risk following their trail on the ground — while all of her poachers assured her the rain would be helping in that respect.
“Be no trail to follow by morning, sir,” Goynes said, the two with him nodding agreement. “We’re getting’ more rain and with little ground cover, it’ll be all over mud — and this soil’s such that it flows easy now. Fills in our trail, see? No more’n two hours o’backtrail, I reckon.”
To demonstrate, he pressed his foot into the mud and lifted it, nodding as the mud flowed back to form a featureless surface where he’d stepped.
“Well, that’s a boon, I suppose,” Alexis said. Still, two hours of trail behind them was a long bit for some searcher to come across.
“Make walking a right piss, though,” Warth, another of the poachers, muttered.
Three
O’, pull me hearties, pull me mates,
And hear the tale true,
When a glory-seeking admiral speaks
What's a poor spacer-man to do?
Warth was right.
The next day dawned, what there was of dawn, with the rain not letting up. Alexis thought it was, indeed, a right piss to be slogging through the thick mud while the mist and droplets settled through the trees’ canopy to light on them.
With no positioning satellites, she was determining how far they’d come by dead reckoning on what few maps her tablet held and a dim memory of where the nearest settlement was from before the boat crashed.
By that reckoning, they’d walked the distance between them and the settlement already, but were no more than a quarter closer to it, due to the switchbacks and false turns brought about by all the ravines and cliffs.
Alexis knew the planet was large and shouldn’t be judged by only a few square kilometers — her own home world of Dalthus contained some unsettled, inhospitable regions — but she began to wonder why anyone had bothered to settle Erzurum in the first place.
They trudged on through the rain, with Alexis making occasional trips up and down the column to encourage the crew.
Column, of course, was a bit of an exaggeration.
These men weren’t soldiers, trained to march in line and cadence for long distances — they were spacers, and used to going their own way, especially if that way might be a bit easier. So, many decided trudging through the mud, made muckier by the footsteps of those in front of them, might not be the easiest path and edged off to the side.
Within an hour’s time, the “column” had degenerated into a group wending their way through the trees and along the ravines in near parallel.
Alexis allowed it, despite Warth’s complaint that walking in line, preferably in each other’s footsteps, would hide their numbers.
“But you’ve said this mud fills in within a few hours, so there are few tracks to follow?” she clarified when he came to argue the point again.
“Well, aye.”
“And it’s not as though there’s any secret about how many men we might have fit aboard a ship’s boat, is there?”
“I suppose.”
“Was the last man in the column when we started out not trudging near knee-deep in the muck?”
“Not knee deep, no matter what he said.”
“Still, would that not leave more of a trail in this mess than spread out as we are?”
Warth wandered off muttering about principles before Alexis could make her point that the men farther back in line had been so exhausted at the effort of lifting their feet that they’d be little use in a fight if they were located. So long as they all remained in sight of each other, which they did, none wishing to be more than an arm’s length from a fellow on this hostile world, there was no harm in it.
At midday, Alexis called a halt to rest and eat what they would of the dry, tasteless ration bars. There were no streams nor cliffs that might provide water nearby, so they sufficed with filling their canteens from what trickles came down out of the trees’ canopy. One of the messes rigged their blankets to catch the rainfall and funnel it, and others soon followed suit.
Alexis visited the wounded again. Morgan still showed no signs of recovery, but the others seemed in good spirits. She settled near Isom again.
The Creature came out at the crinkle of
her ration’s wrapper, sticking its brown head out from under Isom’s blanket. Its fur was disgustingly dry when set against the drenched, bedraggled state of the crew.
“Is it quite fair to make your litter bearers haul the Creature’s weight around as well, do you think?” Alexis asked.
Isom put a protective hand over the mongoose’s head and offered it a bite of his ration bar with the other. The Creature sniffed, nibbled, then sneezed, sending bits of uneaten bar spraying, and bolted back under the blanket.
“The lads don’t mind, sir, and I’ll be on my own feet and walking soon,” Isom said. “Creasy comes back and walks with us a’times — lets Boots ride on his shoulder under his blanket like a sort of hood, he does. There’s a fellow or two with pockets full of better food, as well — they stop by and give Boots a bite now and again, so don’t you worry about him not eating the rations. He’s got his fill.”
“Of course they do,” Alexis muttered around a mouthful of her own ration bar, thinking the Creature had a great deal more sense than any of her men if it had managed to neither trudge through the mud nor eat the dense, tasteless ration blocks.
The private rations didn’t bother her — those would be whatever the men had managed to stuff in their pockets from their own stores as they rushed to abandon ship. Spacers had a strong view of private property and there’d be no jealous trouble from it so long as the boat’s rations held out and stomachs, in general, were full — and any with their own rations would have finished those long before that happened.
Isom himself looked better today. The swelling was down and he was more alert. Whether he’d be walking on his own “soon” was still to be seen, but she was heartened by how he was recovering.
Taking her leave, she found a more sheltered spot and had the radio brought over to monitor things overhead. She could only hear one side of most transmissions without the larger antenna, but it was enough to know what was going on.
She heard more than one report to Mongoose’s first officer, Whitley Villar, in command of another of the boats, from the private ships overhead, that there’d been no word from Alexis, only that the pirate boats continued to quarter the area of the crash. She longed to transmit, both to set Villar’s mind at ease and for him to come pluck her and the men up from this treed swamp they’d wound up in, but that would only alert the pirates who were nearer.
The sharp crack of a laser split the air and Alexis’ head jerked up, it was followed by another, and then a third. It was hard to tell where it had come from, but there were several men rushing in a direction, which she followed.
“Make a lane!” she yelled, coming upon a line of backs, which parted at her call to let her through.
The men were in a half circle around Veals, a topman and one of her boat crew. He was atop one of the low hummocks that surrounded some trees, providing a place out of the worst mud, but instead of resting there he was on his feet, back pressed hard to a tree’s trunk, with his laser rifle aimed at the shallow water before him.
“What happened?” Alexis asked.
“Th — there!” Veals said, gesturing with his rifle’s barrel. “Come straight at me!”
Warth stepped out of the crowd, a long stick in his hand and prodding before him. He went to the spot Veals indicated and probed the muck.
What came up on his stick was a bit of a nightmare and Alexis’ first reaction was to join Veals on his hummock — perhaps scramble up the man himself as a start to reaching the first of the tree’s branches and make her way higher from there.
The thing was not so very large, perhaps two meters long and as big around as Warth’s forearm, but looking like nothing so much as a snake with hundreds — perhaps thousands, Alexis didn’t even want to estimate them — of tiny legs on its underside. Its scaled body was a mottled brown and grey, closely matching the mud and leaves that covered the ground here.
Its head, though, was the true nightmare.
Disproportionately sized to three or four times the width of its body and wedge-shaped, the mouth that fell open when Warth pried at it with another stick was filled with nearly as many teeth as the thing had legs — or so it seemed — each needle-sharp and gleaming white.
Alexis couldn’t blame Veals for shooting, nor for shooting again until he was certain the thing was dead. Even hanging there limp from Warth’s outstretched stick, she felt the urge to draw a weapon and shoot the bloody thing again.
“Looks venomous,” Warth said, eyeing the teeth.
Oh, of course, Alexis thought with a shudder, because the writhing body, scurrying little legs, and glinting fangs weren’t enough to fill the lads’ nightmares already.
She could see they were already eyeing the water warily, some sidestepping to the nearest tree and putting their backs to it.
It was likely the venom, if such it was, wouldn’t kill a human any more than the thing could actually digest a bite of them — humans and most species native to the worlds they settled simply weren’t compatible in that way very often — but there was a chance, still, and little comfort in the thought the thing wouldn’t get any nourishment from a chunk torn off by those teeth, nor that whatever poison it carried would just scurry around their bodies with little effect.
“Good shot,” Warth added, tapping the charred hole on top of the thing’s skull.
It was — and the two farther back along its body. Veals had struck with all three shots, only needing to get its head to stop it.
“Veals,” Alexis said, a worse thought than the snake-thing’s presence striking her. “Your capacitors?”
Veals’ face went white — more so than when she’d arrived — and he glanced frantically at the ground before him.
The laser rifles were powerful, the most powerful weapons their little band had, but like a ship’s guns they required a great deal of power to fire. Power that was provided by a capacitor twice the size of a man’s thumb, and making most such weapons single-shot. The bearer must quickly change the spent capacitor for a fresh one before firing again.
Veals’ shots had come quick on each other, admirably quick, but Alexis feared too quick for him to have had a care in his panic at the snake-thing’s approach for where the spent capacitors wound up.
The spacer dropped to his knees and came up with one, but the look on his face told Alexis the others were likely buried in the muck around the raised ground he stood on.
She swallowed the urge to shout — the look on Veals’ face told her he knew the impact of those capacitors’ loss. They could be recharged, but not if they were buried in Erzurum’s muck, and they had only a half-dozen or so for each of the rifles. Barking at the man wouldn’t help, and his panic at his first sight of the snake-thing was understandable.
Still, she needed to press home the need to conserve their ammunition.
“All right, Veals,” she said, gesturing to the muck around his hummock. “Elbows deep and bring them up again — we’ve few enough to be tossing them about like that.” She scanned the group, meeting the gaze of everyone with a laser weapon. “And the rest of you take note — whether it’s Erzurum’s buccaneers or its beasties we’re after, you collect your caps or I’ll know the reason why and set those weapons to one who will.”
Veals looked at the muck with wide eyes, but bent to the task. “Aye, sir.”
Alexis waited until they’d found and collected all of Veals’ capacitors, then set the group to moving again.
The men seemed wearier now, more than should be accounted for by just the effort of walking — as though the addition of Erzurum’s wildlife in opposition to them was simply one burden too many for them to carry.
She couldn’t blame them, really — they’d signed up to go privateering against the easy targets of merchant ships carrying pirated goods and the occasional pirate himself, not engage in what had become a minor fleet action, crash on an inhospitable planet, and trade their ordered, controlled shipboard life for the discomforts and vagaries of Erzurum’s swamp.
“Mister Dockett!” Alexis called.
“Sir?”
“What does your book say of us ever getting out of this mud and making it back aboard a proper ship?”
Dockett might have been Mongoose’s bosun, but he was also its primary bookmaker, setting the odds on anything the crew might wish to wager a bit of coin or sip of spirits on.
The older man looked around and chuckled, seeing the need for a bit of dark humor in their situation. Privateer crew they might be, but they’d most been aboard a Navy ship at one time or another and knew the spacer’s adage — you shouldn’t have joined if you can’t take a joke.
“Oh, sir, six-to-five against and pick-’em, if I’m any judge.”
“Well, put me down for a guinea on our side, will you?”
“Aye, sir.”
“And Mongoose’s accounts will cover your book for any who take the don’t.”
There were chuckles all around, for they knew full well those accounts would be emptied back to Mongoose’s owner after the loss of the ship. These men would receive their daily pay for the time they were aboard and nothing more, as the cruise had now made no profit at all — and they’d receive that pittance only if they were to make it out of this muck. Moreover, those betting against their group wouldn’t make it off Erzurum anyway, so the bet was moot.
Still, she saw more than one back straighten with those chuckles, and more than a few faces firmed with resolve.
Her own did, as well — she’d see her lads home.
Four
Who cares for the lives of spacer-men?
The Press takes ‘em two a penny.
When an admiral’s glory’s on the line,
It's not will some die, but how many?
While the men scanned the shallow water’s surface for more of the snake-things as they hiked, Alexis’ worries were more about the water itself and the effect it would have on her crew to walk through it for so long. Water and mud seeped inside vacsuit liners to soak the skin, and even those who still wore their full vacsuits — putting up with the bulk and weight in return for a bit more protection — were damp inside from rain streaming through their open necks.
The Queen's Pardon (Alexis Carew Book 6) Page 2