Blood In the Water (34 page)

Very shortly after Leedom made that statement, less than thirty minutes, in fact, he was forced to consider the possibility he was wrong. Very abruptly, the river suddenly fattened and became the lake they'd been told to expect.

“There's where they keepin' all their cruisers,” Paraal said darkly, and at a glance, there appeared to be more than thirty of the things, moored near the northern and southern shores. Several dreadnaughts were there as well, which made the total number that they'd seen more than a dozen. Just as ominous, there were great, long sheds, hundreds of feet long, extending out over the water along the shoreline. Leedom had no idea what they covered, but they were similar to the “wet” Nancy hangars near Kaufman Field, north of Baalkpan. Except Nancy sheds were only about thirty feet wide. These would accommodate something a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet long.

“Damn,” he murmured, remembering the bombs under his wings. He'd been awful tempted to drop them on the palace at Sofesshk, but knew they wouldn't have any more effect than Grik bombs dropped on the Cowflop back at Grik City. And now . . . his six bombs seemed hopelessly inadequate for the target-rich environment they'd discovered. There were the warships, obviously, but there was also whatever the enemy protected beneath the sheds. Added to that were tents,
real
tents, like a dusty white sea of choppy, wedge-shaped waves, utterly uncountable, stretching as far as the eye could see. And closer in were hundreds of zeppelins, moored across the plain surrounding the wide, deep lake.

“Holy smoke,” Leedom said. Just then a thin streamer of white smoke rose among the tents, followed quickly by a score or more just like it.

“Rockets!” Paraal warned. Leedom nodded, but wasn't too worried. They were at six thousand feet. He'd examined the rockets captured at Grik City, and Tikker told him the ones he ran into over the Seychelles would barely reach five thousand. Those had been provided with contact fuses, and had to hit you to hurt you. They'd been more of a menace to troops and equipment on the ground when they inevitably fell to earth. These kept rising, however, and even though they all missed, they shot up
past
the plane. Meek had jumped up to look out the top gunner's position and suddenly flinched back. “Gawd blimey!” he shouted. “They bloody
went off
!”

“What?” Leedom demanded, craning his head around.

“About a hundred feet above us!” Meek confirmed, stuffing himself back between the pilots. “An' look there! More of 'em!”

Leedom couldn't count how many white towers of smoke were rising in their path. Instinctively, he pushed the stick forward.

“New fuses!” Galay bellowed behind them. “They've got
time
fuses now, just like we do, that set 'em off at whatever altitude they pick!”

Leedom couldn't believe it—but it had to be true. His subconscious mind had figured it out first, as a matter of fact. That's why he put the plane into a dive. They heard the explosions this time: a staccato bursting of dozens of small warheads going off—he looked up—amazingly well concentrated around where they would've been if he hadn't evaded. “Get your pictures now, Captain!” he shouted. “Out the starboard side. I'm turning left.” He looked at Paraal—just as several streamers rose in front of them and detonated with white puffs of smoke. An instant later, the plane was hammered by a terrible clatter like a pile of boards dropping on the ground.

“Number four engine's hit!” Paraal cried, staring out and up to the right.

“Hey! We're smoking!” Galay called from behind.

“Cut fuel and power to number four,” Leedom shouted at his copilot, reaching up to cut the throttle. “Hit the brake!”

Paraal twisted the knob on the appropriate fuel line and flipped one of the knife switches beside his knee. The plane started bucking as the
engine coughed and died, then started crabbing to the right. Paraal pushed one of two long levers forward and locked it into place. The prop stopped spinning. Mark advanced the throttle on number three and pushed on his rudder pedal. More rockets burst, above them again, mostly, but a few more of what they used for shrapnel struck the plane.

“We gotta lose our bombs,” Leedom ground out, glancing below. They were down to about four thousand feet and a dreadnaught was directly in line, bow on. Good enough. He would've liked to drop at least one bomb on the sheds, and maybe see what was under them, but that was pointless now. And all his bombs might kill a couple hundred Grik in their tents, but what was a couple hundred? The zeppelins were tempting targets, but as many as there were, they were too far apart to set more than a few alight. He pushed the suddenly very annoyed stick forward again with his right hand, caressing all six bomb-release levers with his left. At twenty-five hundred feet, the massive dreadnaught nearly filled his windscreen when he started dropping bombs—port, starboard, port, starboard . . . then he stopped. The last two would clearly miss—and the sheds were coming up. A group of rockets burst alongside, on the right again, and he felt something in the rudder. Without a word, Paraal grasped his right arm with his left hand and it came away bloody. The sheds were just ahead. Staring through the crude gun sight in front of the windscreen, Mark lined up on the post mounted off center near the nose. But now he needed three hands! He gave up on the machine gun—and dropped his bombs at eighteen hundred feet.

He pulled up and to the left, out over the zeppelins. Surely even Grik wouldn't shoot off rockets over
them
. They would and did, but the big plane was too low and fast now for accurate rocket fire, and nothing else even came close. The plane was balky, draggy, and felt like he was driving a big car in thick mud. But finally, as they passed beyond the zeppelin field and he began to climb once more, the rockets ceased entirely.

“What now?” Paraal asked, his voice strained.

Leedom felt strained as well. “Did you get pictures of
that
?” he roared at Galay instead of answering.

“Ah, yeah. Mostly. I think the last shot was of my feet, but the two before it are probably no good either. I . . . sort of dropped the camera and cracked the lens. But what I got should be good enough. And if it
isn't? I figure we can draw it. None of us are likely to forget that mousetrap for a while!”

“You didn't happen to see what was under those sheds, did you?”

“No. But we hit that Grik heavy pretty hard. At least two bombs. I can still see her burning.”

Leedom looked back at Galay as Meek joined them again. He wasn't about to go back for another look at the sheds. “You okay?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Mr. Meek, would you have a look at Lieutenant Paraal's arm?”

“Of course. I'm as curious as he was what you plan on doin' now, though. I rather doubt you intend to fly back over Sofesshk.”

“No. We've lost our one engine,” he said, oblivious to the fact he hadn't discussed his earlier thoughts with the rest of the crew. “After you make sure the lieutenant won't bleed to death, would you please ask the wireless operator to send what we saw and what happened, as well as a request for a ship,
any
ship, to head our way if can. We might need a pickup if we're losing fuel. But we won't see Sofesshk again, this trip. We'll swing south, around the city, and then cross the river heading northeast. Time to get the hell out of here.”

CHAPTER
23

Grik Sofesshk
The Palace of Vanished Gods

“It would seem that the enemy has found us at last,” said Lord Regent Champion Esshk, Guardian of the Celestial Bloodline, and First General of All the Grik. His tone was one of anger, leavened with bleak resignation. He stood on the slab-paved entrance walkway to the great, arched ground-level entrance to the Palace of Vanished Gods—
his
palace now, in a sense—looking at the sky to the west where the enormous blue plane had gone. Like nearly everyone in Sofesshk, no doubt, on both sides of the river, he'd raced outside to see what was causing the frightening thunder in the sky. Unlike most, however, he'd immediately suspected—and then known—what it was, remembering the great “PBY” flying boat the enemy used to help break the Invincible Swarm at the place they called “Baalkpan.” This thing appeared to be almost as large and had even more engines.

He began to pace, rapidly clacking the claws on his hands and practically hissing with frustration. His guards bolted out of his way as he swept the massive, age-worn paving stones with his whipping, feathery tail and long Imperial Red cape. It was disconcerting enough that his enemy—former prey!—could make things like that, but even more so that it should pass overhead with impunity. They'd devised defenses against such incursions, but he hadn't really expected to need them. Certainly not so soon! The enemy was weak and battered after the recent battles, and Esshk's campaign of misdirection had seemed to be succeeding. He'd never dreamed the enemy—
Captain Reddy!
—had the wherewithal, or even the inclination, to continue his searches just yet. And Esshk's own complacency had undoubtedly fed that of his generals commanding the rocket batteries around the city.

He finally released the building, furious hiss he'd been restraining and turned to face his one confidant in all the world. The Chooser, now “Lord Chooser of All the Ghaarrichk'k,” was puffing slightly from his effort to keep up with his pacing. He was shorter, certainly poorly exercised, and garishly dressed beyond all reason. His cape wasn't as long as Esshk's, but was much more ornate. Tiny gilded bones were woven directly into the dark fabric, and they glittered as it moved. More gilded bones dangled and clattered from necklaces and other . . . suspensions about his person, including the ornate dagger he wore in a studded white baldric. His claws were painted red, and the downy fur around his eyes and snout had been colored to hide the white encroaching there. He'd even begun weaving the dark crest that stood up on his head into a rigid fan he couldn't lay back if he wanted to. Esshk generally disapproved of such things, but the Chooser was prone to fits of . . . unease, and his crest always betrayed them. Under the circumstances, what he'd done was probably for the best.

And Esshk needed him, not only for his advice, but for the forbidding authority the Lord Chooser brought to their new regime. Choosers, as a class of Hij, were not only the keepers of ancient wisdoms, rites of succession, and elevation, but were the ultimate arbiters of life and death. It had always been they who determined, based on mysterious criteria guarded by their order, which hatchlings would be elevated to the status of Hij, which would remain Uul, and which would be raised as the most abject laborer Uul—available for the cookpots at any time—and which
could simply be eaten at birth. It had been this chooser, attendant upon the Celestial Mother herself, who'd reluctantly blessed a suspension of the cullings for the duration of the current emergency so sufficient armies could be bred to meet it. The experiments that followed—largely aided by General of the Sea Hisashi Kurokawa, Esshk had to admit—not only resulted in more warriors than had ever existed before but, with the new training and indoctrination Kurokawa introduced, far
better
warriors. With that superiority, however, came great advantage and equally great risk. Both stemmed from a capability for independent thought that had, until recently, been reserved entirely to the Hij. That capacity made bad warriors worse, but it was more than balanced by making good warriors better. The real danger lay in the fact that it was now quite obvious to Esshk, at least, that the greatest “mystery” protected by the choosers was that there
was
no qualitative, observable difference between one hatchling and another. Their order had existed solely as a means of artificial population—and thought—control.

Absent that control, the “new army” Esshk had been nurturing (and reserving, for the most part) should be more similar to the armies of his enemies than to most other Grik forces elsewhere on the continent. They were better trained, more disciplined, better able to act on their own initiative (notwithstanding the lapse of Sofesshk's missile batteries), and—again, thanks to programs instituted by Kurokawa—almost instinctively more loyal to Esshk than to the new Celestial Mother they'd recently elevated. For now, for Esshk's current purposes, that was good. But similar programs had been initiated in at least two other regencies. He still controlled them, in the name of the Celestial Mother he protected, and they cooperated willingly enough. But what of General Halik? He still had no idea what had happened to his most promising protégé, or if he and his army still existed. The world had grown quite complicated indeed.

He glanced away from the Chooser, contemplating the western sky once more, as a backdrop for the teeming,
seething
city and its multitudes. Regardless of the skill and ingenuity of his race's greatest enemy, he couldn't really imagine defeat. One day, the war would end and the current emergency would pass. What then? As he'd long feared, it would be no simple thing to return his race to its proper path. In the meantime, the Chooser had endorsed and assisted the steps Esshk had taken to
secure absolute power, in fact if not in name. In return, Esshk supported the legitimacy of the Chooser and his order. Their original purpose would be required again someday. And the Chooser had risen above a lifetime of laziness and court privilege to become Esshk's most discreet advisor and confidant, the necessities inspired by the way the world had turned finally forcing him to cultivate a latent but extraordinarily keen and conniving mind. That was something they both would need.

“Lord Regent Champion,” the Chooser said tentatively. Esshk looked back at him.

“Yes?”

“They could have dropped bombs. I think I even
saw
bombs, suspended beneath the wings of that monstrosity.”

“As did I, but they did not,” Esshk assured, but his voice turned grim. “They will probably use them on the forces we gather at Lake Nalak.” He jerked his head diagonally. “One craft, even such as that, can do little damage there. The greatest damage will come from what they will and have already seen. The full measure of surprise we had hoped to achieve has been lost. Only the timing and method of our attack can be kept from them now. We must look to ways of growing those assets.”

“True,” agreed the Chooser, “and any damage they might do to the swarm at Lake Nalak is insignificant . . . compared to what they might have done here, to us.” He took a few paces himself. “Our race realizes it will be a great while before our new Celestial Mother is fit to lead.” Both of them had already decided that would never happen. Henceforth, the Regent Champion—and the Celestial Mother's Chooser—would forever hold supreme authority behind the Celestial throne. That was how it had to be, but for as long as they could manage it, they must maintain the fiction that all would one day become as it had been for all of time. There was no reason either of them shouldn't live another twenty years or so. By then, few enough who remembered things any other way, or in a position to challenge the new order, would remain. “A warrior reaches fighting age in a year and a half. Your ‘new' warriors are proficient in two. Their officers, even elevated from older, experienced warriors, need that long as well. But a female just achieving breeding age cannot be expected to choose which claw to clean her nostrils with in that time. We have five more years, perhaps a decade, to fully effect all the changes we have discussed, before the higher-ranking Hij might consider that
our stewardship has lingered overlong. Until then,” the Chooser continued, “you are recognized as the utmost authority. But for the first time in memory, that authority is dependent to some degree upon the submission of the Hij you rule. I . . . do not know what will happen if bombs fall upon Sofesshk.”

“You fear
rebellion
?” Esshk demanded, red eyes wide and blinking.

“No, of course not. And the masses may react more with fury at those who dared such a thing than with dissatisfaction toward you for not preventing it. But
some
would be dissatisfied—just as Regent Ragak was.”

“Now that the enemy knows where we are, I do not know how we can prevent a single bomb from falling on Sofesshk, regardless how effective our defenses might be. Our airships take grave losses, surely, but even the enemy cannot prevent us from bombing
them
at will.”

“Then move the army here. If the bombings are severe, we may lose small numbers of it, but it is most loyal to you. It can effectively deal with any who may grow . . . dissatisfied.”

Esshk considered. “Very well. The army can be embarked as easily here as at the lake, when the time comes to launch the Swarm. And camped in the open, it would take more losses to raids there than here, at any rate.”

“Even better,” the Chooser ventured, “would be to embark it now.
Attack
now, before the enemy has time to gather against us.”

Esshk snorted with renewed frustration. “We are not ready! The force we gather to strike the enemy from behind is only now beginning to deploy. It is too small and unsupported. The army you suggest moving here
can
do that, but it would not yet be a certain thing.” He glared at the Chooser. “I
want
a certain thing! And I want the rest of our warriors that are yet to arrive from the south. The rains have hampered their movement.” He began to pace again himself. “The cursed rains! They have slowed
everything
, from corralling, slaughtering, and drying provisions, to the construction of transports. Provisions!” He snorted, suddenly distracted. “What general ever had to concern himself with
preparing
provisions, beyond what was needed for a few days? Swarms of the past always gathered them as they advanced, or from the land or prey they conquered. But we, unable to count on the prey to provide them, must take them with us!”

With some effort, he stopped pacing and lowered his voice. “Our
warships are almost complete. Their hulls were made before the rains, and they are fitting out now. And they will be better than any that Kurokawa's race ever gave us,” he said proudly, accusingly, neglecting to add that the designs for the improvements they'd incorporated had been left behind by the Japanese when they bolted for Zanzibar. “But the transports! They are made almost entirely of green wood that we cannot cure or fit in the rain! Barely two-thirds of what we need are complete, and the shipmakers tell me that they will likely not last a year before they rot away.”

“We will not need them for a year,” the Chooser soothed.

Esshk glared at him, then waved angrily at the sky. “And the
one
day the sky is clear . . . !” That's when he noticed one of the zeppelins that had risen near the city was approaching the palace and he paused his rant. Motors revved and fluttered as the great airship, already descended to barely a hundred feet, crept toward them from downwind. Just short of the palace, which reared high above it now, the airship came to a stop and a line tumbled down from the forward gondola. An instant later, an air warrior snaked rapidly down the line until he touched the ground, then raced toward them. Esshk waved his guards back as they moved to stop the intruder, and the flier hurled himself to the paving stones at Esshk's feet.