What Distant Deeps (26 page)

Adele knelt, waving her pistol gently to cool the barrel before she put it away. The seadragon’s jaws clopped shut and opened in tetanic convulsions.

Adele didn’t let herself blink. If her eyes closed even for an instant, she would see that great head stretching forward to crush the fine, organized brain of Adele Mundy.

Daniel didn’t think the seadragon had reached Adele, but the motionless silence in which she knelt on the ramp made him worry as he trotted up to her. Had the tail slapped her as the creature went over the side? He wouldn’t have noticed with all the other things that were going on at the time.

“Perfect marksmanship, Adele,” he said cheerfully. “As expected, of course. I regret the danger to you, but you were right that there was no better way.”

Adele put her pistol away and rose. “I wasn’t in danger so long as it was you and Hogg with the line,” she said. She sounded like her usual imperturbable self, but Daniel still had the feeling—it was no more than that—that something had disturbed her. She glanced past him and said, “Hogg? Are you all right?”

“I won’t be shaking hands any time soon,” Hogg muttered. “Nothing that won’t heal, but it hurts like bloody blue blazes right now.”

Daniel looked over his shoulder. He’d felt as though the creature’s weight was going to pinch off his right arm against the doorjamb he’d hooked it around. Hogg had shouted at the same time, but that had seemed a natural reaction to his effort in holding on to the line. In his concern for Adele, Daniel hadn’t realized that Hogg was injured.

He was holding his right hand up—keeping it above his heart. He’d taken the mesh mitten off his left hand and put it back with the coiled monofilament into one of his pockets, but the mitten was still on his right. It looked as stiff as an inflated bladder.

“It’s my own fault,” Hogg growled. “I didn’t trust to be able to just hold the sinker, so I gave the line a wrap around my hand. I figured the glove’d save me.”

He smiled ruefully at his raised hand. “And I guess it did,” he said, “but it was a near thing. If the line hadn’t of sawed through the lizard’s neck when it did, I don’t bloody know what was going to happen.”

Adele nodded crisply. “Thank you, Hogg,” she said. “The Medicomp should be able to take care of the problem as soon as we get you to the Princess Cecile.”

“I’d do it the same way again, ma’am,” Hogg said with a real grin. “I still don’t trust I wouldn’t let go if I just had the sinker to hold. And Tovera’d shoot me sure as sunrise if I let something happen to you.”

“It wouldn’t be anything so quick,” said Tovera from the outside door. She still held the flag; Daniel supposed she must have had Hogg tie it to her arms. “But I don’t expect that to happen.”

“Right,” said Daniel, speaking more sharply than he normally would have. He really wanted to end the discussion. It hadn’t told him anything about Tovera—or Hogg, really—that he hadn’t known before, but it made him uncomfortable to dwell on it. “Let me take a look at your hand, Hogg.”

“Naw,” said Hogg. “Let’s find the case, bring the Sissie in, and slap me under the Medicomp like Mistress Mundy says. Till then, I keep the glove on, right?”

Daniel thought about it. “Yes,” he said, “all right.”

He grinned as he stepped briskly up the remaining short length of the ramp. He’d been afraid he was going to lose his grip so that the seadragon would pull Hogg off the ramp. He had determined that he’d let his arms be torn from their sockets before he let his friend and servant down.

It shouldn’t have surprised him that Hogg had felt the same way about failing Adele. The four of them functioned less as a team than as a close-knit family whose members would rather die than fail the others.

It was a good group to be a part of. The best, by heaven!

The tower roof was very slightly domed, and there was no coping around its edge. Rain would run off it down the smooth crystal sides, splashing on the ground fifty feet below.

Daniel glanced back. Hogg was still inside, left-handedly cutting Tovera’s arms free, but Adele had followed.

“I wonder if this place was built by spacers?” he said, grinning.

She shrugged. “Or by birds,” she said. “At any rate, it doesn’t appear to be designed for human use.”

Daniel felt his lips purse. “There are eccentric humans,” he said, “but I take your point. Still, that’s a question for the future. What we need now is to find Tovera’s case.”

Adele unexpectedly sat on the rooftop and took out her personal data unit. She gave his puzzlement a tiny smile. “I was afraid that I might lose the control wands in the crash,” she said. “I didn’t, so I guess this was my lucky day.”

She isn’t joking, Daniel realized. His smile spread slowly. Of course Adele hadn’t been concerned about being killed. Her troubles were over if that happened.

He turned quickly to survey the boggy landscape. He didn’t want Adele to see the sudden grim cast of his face. Her problems might be over with her death, but Daniel Leary’s would become much worse. Perhaps insupportably worse.

A wedge of faint violet lines, a hologram projected by Adele’s data unit, suddenly overlay the terrain before him. Its apex was the wreck of the car. He glanced toward her.

“The axis of the triangle extends from the line between where the car hit before the last bounce,” Adele said, “to where it lies now. The edges are fifteen degrees to either side.”

She shrugged. “That was a guess,” she said, “but I thought it might help to refine the search area.”

Hogg and Tovera came up through the oval opening. Hogg looked pale, but his face was set in lines of glum determination.

“Yes,” said Daniel with satisfaction. “That will help a great deal, I think.”

He lowered the visor of his commo helmet. Its optics would give him not only magnification but other viewing options. A sweep in the infrared would make the case stand out if it were even slightly warmer or cooler than—

“There it is,” Hogg said, pointing with his whole left arm. “Eighty yards out and behind that tussock of sedges. It looks like it’s
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
yeah, it’s floating. There’s a pond or something there, maybe a slough.”

Daniel blinked. For a moment he felt as though he’d been insulted; then he burst out laughing.

“What’s the matter, young master?” Hogg said, frowning in surprise. “You see it there, don’t you?”

Daniel lifted his visor again. “Yes, Hogg,” he said, “I see it now that you’ve pointed it out. Though I’d have found it eventually on my own, I’m sure.”

“Of course you would’ve,” Hogg said in amazement. “It’s about as bloody obvious as a deacon in a whorehouse, isn’t it?”

He grimaced. “Want me to go fetch it, then?”

“One moment,” said Daniel, lowering his visor. A poacher’s experienced eye was a remarkable shortcut if you happened to have one available, but technology still had its place.

The case was floating with only one corner above the surface of the pond; it looked like a miniature dark-gray iceberg. It was 238 feet from where Daniel stood—Hogg was slightly behind him, of course—and seven feet out from the shore.

It was also about six feet to the right of Adele’s fifteen-degree estimate. The bank must be fairly sharp, because the vegetation cut off abruptly at the water’s edge.

“I might be able to wade to it, I guess,” said Hogg. He knew that Daniel wasn’t going to let him and his injured hand go after the case, but he still lobbied for that solution. “Anyways, it won’t be much of a swim.”

A seadragon slid under the attaché case and curved out of the field of Daniel’s magnified optics. It was about five feet long and had feathery gills along the sides of its neck.

“It’s a nursery pool for the dragons, Hogg,” Daniel said as he widened his field of view slightly. The water had an amber tinge from tannin, but it was clear enough to show movement close beneath its surface. “I can see half a dozen of them. They seem to have territories.”

“Do they come up for air, maybe?” Hogg asked hopefully.

“No, they’ve got gills,” Daniel said. He lifted his visor and faced his servant directly. “I’ll need your knife.”

“I could—” Hogg said tentatively, but he was reaching into a pocket. It was on the right side of his trousers, but they were baggy enough to let him tug a handful toward him.

“No,” said Daniel, “you couldn’t.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Hogg mumbled, handing over a folding knife with a knuckle-duster grip and a spike on the butt. It should have been clumsy, but Daniel had seen Hogg throw it with perfect accuracy. “Bloody hand.”

Daniel beamed at the women; they had been waiting patiently. Adele and Tovera were urbanites. They had no idea of what the hunters were discussing, but they knew to hold their tongues when they were ignorant.

“Now,” said Daniel. “Adele, you’ll guide us from up here while Hogg and I go to fetch the case. And Hogg, little though you like it, you’ll have to wear my commo helmet so that you can listen to Adele’s instructions.”

“Aww
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
,” Hogg muttered. “Well, I guess it serves me right for getting hurt.”

More brightly he added, “Let’s get the Sissie here. Because I’m really looking forward to interviewing an assistant commissioner about what happened to the car’s motors!”

“The mistress says we’re getting off to the right,” Hogg grumbled. “What I say is that if I didn’t have this bloody pot on my head, I’d be able to find my bloody way around like I have since before I started walking.”

The ground had seemed solid from the top of the tower, but there were mud-filled swales in which the two men squished knee-deep. So far as Daniel could tell, the vegetation was indistinguishable from that which grew on firmer soil, but the buglike parasites sucking juices from the stems here were bright orange instead of the yellow with brown speckles that he’d seen close around the tower.

“I appreciate you wearing the helmet for me,” Daniel said, holding the flag up in his left hand.

In truth, he and Hogg both knew that it was almost impossible to keep a straight line in a marsh like this, and an unfamiliar marsh besides. The tower was the only high fixed point. Without a second point for triangulation, you could wander miles off course.

The commo helmet had a compass function, of course, but it wasn’t worth trying to teach Hogg how to use it. He’d always gotten along without equipment, and by this time of his life he wasn’t going to change easily.

“She says go straight through these reeds,” Hogg said. His pistol was in his left hand. Because he was walking a pace back from Daniel, he kept the muzzle in the air. Unlike Adele, he didn’t shoot equally well with either hand. Until he spent some time connected to the Medicomp, the pistol was less useful than the knife would have been.

It kept Hogg from feeling useless, though. Tovera would have made a better commo relay person, but for Daniel to have told Hogg to wait in the tower would have been a crushing insult.

Daniel reached out with the pole to part the reeds; the knife was withdrawn in his right hand to disembowel anything that lunged at the flag. “Right you are, Hogg,” he said cheerfully. “And there’s the case.”

They had reached the lagoon. The bank was undercut and eighteen inches high. The meandering body of water was forty feet across near where they stood. As best Daniel could tell without falling in, it was five or six feet deep. That range would be the difference between swimming and wading.

A juvenile dragon curved close to the bank and darted out again. It didn’t come within a foot of the surface, so it would be a waste of time to shoot at it.

“Little bastard,” Hogg said morosely. “We don’t want to eat your dinner. If you’d just leave us alone, you could grow up to be big and strong.”

“I’m showing disrespect for it by moving into its territory,” Daniel said. He smiled, but his amusement was tempered by knowledge. “Which isn’t a great deal different from us and the Alliance, is it, after all?”

“Well, we’ve taught the wogs to back off plenty of times,” growled Hogg. “I don’t mind teaching a lizard, though I still think it ought to be me doing it.”

“Warn me if something comes up, Hogg,” Daniel said instead of bothering to respond directly. He sat on the bank, letting his feet hang in the water. He could swim with his clothing on if he had to—certainly he could swim the few yards necessary here—and the tough cloth of the garments would be some protection. He slid into the lagoon.

The bottom wasn’t quite as deep as he’d feared, but his boots raised shovelfuls of silt to cloud the water. The attaché case rocked away, but not far.

A juvenile seadragon banked sharply and arrowed toward the disturbance. It drove itself with its long, flattened tail, keeping its legs close to the body except when it thrust one or more of the paddle feet out as rudders.

Daniel slapped the flag into the water to his left. The seadragon made a ninety-degree turn as smoothly as water running through a pipe elbow. It rotated onto its side as it struck, ripping the fabric; the teeth were blunt, but the creature’s powerful jaw muscles were intended to crush them through crab shells.

Daniel flipped his arm sideways, trying to toss the dragon onto the bank. He got it half out of the water; then the pole broke. He ducked as the creature writhed through the air where his head had been an instant previously.

It slapped the water, tangled and half-blinded by the flag wrapping its head but snapping furiously at whatever was close. Daniel stabbed the creature just in front of its external gills and twisted the knife.

The seadragon continued to thrash, even after Daniel lifted its torso above the surface. Its jaws snapped three times very quickly; then the eye he could see glazed. The legs and tail were still moving, but they were uncoordinated.

Using the knife as a gaff, Daniel hurled the creature farther into the lagoon. The motion took a great deal of effort; the short fight had wrung more out of him than he had expected. He waded deeper and caught the handle of the attaché case with the water barely touching his chin; then he slowly forced his way back to the bank and tossed the case onto land.