A Talent for War (40 page)

"I'm going to sleep on the beach."

"Alex, don't do it."

"Chase, the cockpit is cramped. Anyhow, it's lovely out here." It was: the surf was hypnotic, and
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the moving air tasted of salt.

"Alex, you don't know the place. You could get eaten during the night."

I laughed—the way people do when they want to suggest that someone is being unnecessarily alarmist—stood in front of one of the capsule's cameras, and waved. But her concern was sufficiently infectious that I would probably have retreated back into the cockpit, if I could have done so graciously.

With a suspicious glance at the black line of jungle which was only a dozen or so meters away, I spread one of the blankets on the sand. The spot I'd picked was only a few quick steps from the capsule. "Goodnight, Chase," I said.

"Good luck, Alex."

In the morning, I crisscrossed the island for an hour, but there was nothing. Disappointed, I set out again, over a wide expanse of unbroken ocean. About midmorning, I ran into a sudden squall. I went higher, to get over the storm. There were patches of heavy weather throughout most of the rest of the day. I inspected more sites, sometimes in bright sunlight, sometimes in cold drizzles. There were plenty of floaters, which sheltered from the storms under trees or on the lee side of embankments and rock walls.

My instruments were most effective at shorter ranges, so I stayed within fifty meters of the surface. Chase urged me to go higher, arguing that the capsule was subject to sudden violent air movements, and a sharp downdraft could easily drive it into the ocean. Still, there was no sign of turbulence, despite the numerous storms.

I looked at probably twenty islands that third afternoon. None seemed promising. I was approaching one more (which was big, and a lot like the island with the volcano), when something odd caught my eye. I wasn't sure what it was, though it was connected with a cloud of floaters which were milling aimlessly just off the surface, about a half kilometer north of the island.

I switched over to manual, and cut air speed.

"What's wrong?"

"Not a thing, Chase."

"You're losing altitude."

"I know. I was looking at the floaters." Several of them reacted in a way that suggested they were aware of my presence, just as they had the day before. But they must have decided I was no threat.

No wind blew. The ocean was calm.

I could not shake the feeling that something was wrong in the picture: sea, sky, animates.

A wave.

It was on the far side of the floaters, approaching: green and white, its crest breaking and reforming, it rolled through the silent sea.

The island was long and narrow, with a high rocky coast at the eastern hook, sloping down into bright green forest and white beach. Quiet pools lay within sheltered glades.

"My kind of place," said Chase, not without irritation.

I drifted down through the heavy afternoon air, and settled onto the sand just beyond the water line. The sun, approaching the horizon, was almost violet. I pushed the canopy back, climbed out, and dropped to the ground. The surf was loud.

I looked out across that ocean over which no ship had ever sailed. It was a lovely, warm, late summer day, with just enough bite in the salt air. Here. If there was an appropriate place on this world for the conspiracy to come to its climax, it should have been here.

But I knew it was not so. The scanners had shown no evidence of previous habitation. No one else had ever stood on that beach.

Out beyond the breakers, some of the smaller floaters played in the air currents.

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The wave kept coming. It was somehow not in sync with the surface: too symmetrical, too purposeful, and perhaps too quick. It was in fact accelerating.

Curious.

I walked down toward the waterline. A couple of huge shells, one almost as big as the capsule, were lolling gently in the shallows. A small creature with a lot of legs sensed my presence and burrowed swiftly into the sand. But it left its tail exposed. Something else, a quick flicker of light, moved in the water and was gone.

Some of the floaters turned toward the wave, and it dissipated. They exhibited uncertainty.

Most drifted as high as they could without lifting their tendrils out of the ocean. A few, smaller, brighter colored, probably younger, were nudged loose altogether and rose into the afternoon sky.

I watched, fascinated.

Nothing happened.

One by one, the floaters settled back toward the surface, until, eventually, almost the entire herd was down on the water again. I assumed they were feeding on the local equivalent of plankton.

The ocean stayed quiet.

But I could feel their uneasiness.

I was about to return to the capsule when the wave reformed. Much nearer.

I wished I'd brought the binoculars with me, but they were in a storage bin behind the seats, and I didn't want to take the time to go back to the aircraft, which was about two hundred meters down the beach.

The wave was headed directly toward the floaters, approaching on a course more or less parallel to the coastline. Again, it seemed to be gaining velocity. And getting bigger. A thin line of foam developed at its crest.

I wondered what sort of sense organs the floaters had? Anything with vision would have been clearing out, but they only bobbed nervously about on the thin strands that resembled nothing so much as tethers, as if the creatures were tied to the ocean.

The wave rushed toward them.

There was a sudden squeal, a shrill keening that seemed just on the edge of audibility. The floaters erupted skyward simultaneously, in the manner of startled birds. They were apparently able to pump air through the central gas bag, and they were doing that vigorously, trying to gain altitude, but the larger ones were slow.

Nevertheless, the entire colony would, I thought, be well clear of the water when the wave passed; why then did their cries sound like panic?

The wave acquired a sharp angular shape as though its essential fluidity had hardened. And it passed, harmlessly, I thought, beneath the retreating floaters.

But several of the creatures were abruptly jerked down toward the surface, and were hauled twisting and flailing in the wake of the disturbance. Two got tangled in each other's tendrils. And the wave changed direction again. Toward shore.

Toward where I was standing.

Chase's voice: "Alex, what the hell's going on?"

"Feeding time," I said. "There's something in the water."

"What? I can't get a good look at it. What is it?"

Her questions were coming closer together, tumbling over one another. The onrushing wall of water climbed higher. It was long, almost as long as the beach itself, which would have taken fifteen minutes to walk across.

I broke for the capsule, which seemed impossibly far away. The sand was thick and heavy underfoot. I churned through it, fixing my eyes on the aircraft, listening for a change in the dull roar of the surf. I lost my balance and pitched forward, but came up running, pumping wooden
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legs.

Chase had gone silent. She would be watching through the videos, and that thought caused me to reflect (as if everything were happening in slow motion) that my dash across the beach displayed a degree of terror that would embarrass me later. If there was to be a later. I could sense her holding her breath; and so my flight became even more frenzied.

I rehearsed what I would have to do to lift off. Open the canopy. (My God, had I shut the son of a bitch? Yes! There it was, dead ahead, gray and gleaming and closed.) Activate the magnetics.

Energize internal systems. Pull back on the yoke.

I could activate from where I was by whispering the instruction into the commlink, but I'd have to slow down to do it, get my breathing under control. That would lose time, and anyhow my body was running on its own. No way I'd be able to stop it.

The wave was entering the breakers now. But it was enormously higher, and heavier, than the combers it rolled over. Goddam tidal wave. But there was an odd lack of fluidity to it: the sense of the thing was not that something enormous lurked within, but that the wave itself was somehow alive. The water that composed it seemed a deeper green than the ocean, and, in the sunlight, I discerned a dark, fibrous strain. A network. A web.

Through all this the shrill ululation of the entangled floaters had been rising in pitch, but diminishing in volume. As, presumably, they were dragged into the churning water.

There were tidal pools near the capsule. Thick brown water ran into them, and they began to overflow their banks. A long, slow mud-colored wave broke on the shore and rolled high up the beach.

It came my way, and I splashed through it. It clung to my boots, pulled at me, and tried to suck me into the sand. I broke free and ran on.

I ran blindly. Something hissed past me, a thin fibrous strand. The beach made for slow, ponderous going. I couldn't get my breath and fell headlong. Some of the water got onto my right hand: I felt a stab of pain that brought tears. I wiped the flesh against dry sand, and ran again.

Ahead, the tide swirled over the skids and around the ladder. I was slogging through it, one heavy step at a time, wrenching each boot free before moving on.

In the shallows, the wave broke, and roared across the beach.

Only one of the trapped floaters was still in the air. It whipped in tight little circles, squealing ceaselessly, fueling my own panic.

The sun was blocked off now.

Chase's voice exploded into the tableau: "Come on, Alex. Run!"

I plunged desperately across the last few meters. The depth of water underfoot was increasing, and my lower clothes were wet and beginning to burn, and they slid clammily over my flesh.

Another strand, fibrous and green and alive, arced around one foot, and pulled tight. I tumbled against the ladder, held on, and kicked free of the boot. I scrambled up, hit the release, waited in sheer panic while the canopy opened, fell into the cockpit, started the magnetics, and stabbed at the computer panel to activate the rest of the systems. Then I yanked back on the yoke and the capsule jerked into the air. The wave hit the struts and skids, the vehicle rolled sharply on its side, and nearly dumped me out. I dangled over the boiling water, and for a terrible moment, I thought the capsule was going to flip completely over. More filaments whispered toward me.

The tip of one brushed my foot. Another wrapped around the undercarriage.

I scrambled into the cockpit and pulled the canopy shut. In the same moment, the vehicle lurched and dropped. I looked around for a knife, thinking wildly about climbing back outside. I was lucky: there was none. It forced me to take a moment to think.

I pushed the yoke quickly forward. The capsule fell a few more meters, and then I kicked in full thrust and jammed it back. We leaped up and ahead; shuddered to a quick, bone-ripping halt,
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and then lurched free.

I didn't know it then, but the undercarriage was gone.

I threw most of my clothes out after it.

Below, the thick, gummy water had rolled over much of the island.

And I shuddered for Christopher Sim and his men.

After that, I no longer considered tropical islands as likely candidates for my search. Surely, I thought, the conspirators would have been aware of the dangers. They would have looked for something else.

Mid-morning of the next day, while I cruised somberly through a gray rainy sky, the monitors drew a jagged line across the long curve of the horizon. The ocean grew loud, and a granite peak emerged from the mist off to my right. It was almost a needle, worn smooth by wind and water.

There were others, a thousand towers rising from the dark water, marching from northeast to southwest on a course almost directly parallel to the orbit of the Corsarius. The storm beat against them, and buffeted the small craft in which I flew. Chase urged me to go higher, get above them.

"No," I said. "This is it."

The winds drove me among the peaks. I navigated with as much caution as I could muster.

But I quickly got confused, and lost track of where I'd been, where I wanted to go. Chase refused to help from the Centaur. Eventually I was forced to take it up a few thousand meters and wait for the storm to end. In the meantime it got dark.

The red-tinged sun was well into the sky when I woke. The air was cold and clear.

Chase said good morning.

I was stiff and uncomfortable and I needed a shower. I settled for coffee, and drifted back down among the towers. "It's here, somewhere," I told her.

I said it over and over, as. the day wore on.

The spires glittered blue and white and gray. And the ocean broke against them. Occasionally, on the sheer walls, a tree or a bush had taken root. Birds screamed at the heights, and patroled the boiling sea. Floaters, perhaps fearing the combination of sudden air currents and sharp rock, were not to be seen. Smarter than I was, maybe.

In all that wilderness, there seemed hardly a place where a human could set foot.

"Straight ahead," said Chase, galvanized. "What's that?"

I put down the binoculars to look at the screens she was using. She blanked all but one: a peak of moderate size, utterly without any unusual characteristic. I should note that I was expecting to find something with its top lopped off. A place that had been thoroughly flattened and made habitable.

That was not the case here. Rather, what I saw was a wide ledge, about a third of the way down the precipice.

Déjà vu.

Sim's Perch.

It was far too level, and too symmetrical, to be natural. "I see it."

I eased up the magnification. A round object stood on the widest part of the shelf. A dome!

I stared through the scopes: there had been no way on or off, up or down. Not that it mattered.

Odd that a man who had owned the light years should eventually play out his life confined to a few hundred square meters.

Other than the shelf and the dome, there was no sign of the hand of man. The scene possessed almost a domestic aspect. I imagined how it must have looked at night, with lights in the windows, and its illustrious tenants possibly seated out front idly discussing their role in the war.