Wildcatter (20 page)

Meredith scrambled across the shower doors. He followed. By the time he reached the far side, the water was spilling into the decon chamber. He slid open a panel to let the big shower cubicle take the first of the flood while he made his escape through the second doorway and found a safe foothold on the foldaway bunk that served as a ladder. He let the door latch itself. Then he scrambled down, landing hard on his bare feet. The dormitory was blessedly quiet, the roar of the storm barely detectable through the hull.

He wished he’d saved a reserve of rainwater.

* * *

In the gloom, lit only by his helmet lamp, Meredith sat on the tumbled bedding, making herself more decent with another sheet. Seth looked around for another, absurdly conscious of the vivid red welts where the centaur had slapped him. Fortunately the camera had not recorded that foolish brawl.

 
“That door is a devil to open,” Meredith remarked. Her calmness would have been incredible if he did not suspect she was slipping into some sort of shock.

“Not if the room beyond it is full of water, it won’t be.” He straightened out another mattress for himself.

“You don’t happen to have a blazer on you?”

“Didn’t bring one.”

“Then I’ll eat sushi. Lend me your knife.”

Seth wasn’t tempted to join her for dinner. He was too parched to eat anything, but he did accept a fragment of Cacafuegian salmon for his sample bag.

“Why bother?” Meredith said with her mouth full. “‘Indigenous materials from a world inhabited by sentients must be sur­rendered to an authorized representative of ISLA.’”

True. “I promised JC I’d collect samples for him. If he wants to deep-space them, that’s his privilege.”

He left the light on, because his battery had at least ten hours’ power remaining, longer than the air in the cabin would last. The shuttle shuddered again as another wave struck it, even bounced slightly. Neither of them commented.

“How does it taste?”

“Excellent,” she said with her mouth full. “Needs some Tartar sauce.” She ate two slices of raw fish, wrapped the rest in a pillowcase and tucked it away, out of sight or scent. It might be stinking up the dormitory, but the dormitory already reeked of too many things for one more to matter.

By then Seth had noted that the noise of the storm had stopped altogether and the cabin was starting to shift uneasily, both observations suggesting that the shuttle must be almost submerged.

He said, “Since no one can overhear us here and you trust me like you would your own mother, tell me about Commodore Duddridge.”

“Of course I trust you, Mom, but you’re recording everything we say.”

“Then pretend I’m Grandma.”

“That’s worse. What about Commodore Duddridge?”

“Do you trust him?”

“As much as I trust any bottom-line, bottom-feeding low-life. I told him so, the last time we spoke, just before the shuttle rolled. I told him things I’d been wanting to say for a long time.”

“What sort of things?”

“Well he asked me a lot of personal questions, about my experience with various guys in the crew.
Really
personal details about their technique and performance. So I felt at liberty to tell him how much better in bed they all were than he was and how most anyone aboard would make a better commodore. I told him I expected he would blame the disaster on me. I wanted to get that into the record. He assured me that he would see that no blame attached to me for what happened to the landing party.”

“And you didn’t believe him?”

“Never!” Meredith moved as if seeking a more comfortable position. No position was comfortable for long in 1.62 gees. “Old Doddery is old for deep-space work and angling for a management slot. He sucks up to the top brass, puts Galactic’s balance sheet ahead of anything else, and still wants the crew to think of him as a brother. He’s always sincere, no matter how little he means it.”

That had been Seth’s impression of the man in the one recorded glimpse he had obtained, but could he be so mean-spirited that he would leave two women to die out of personal dislike?

“When he pulled out, he posted a yellow flag, meaning plague. His beacon message dwelt on the hurricane-force winds and a virus that could penetrate all barriers. He never mentioned the centaurs at all.”

“What? But I told him they were sentient! And I was right. Every time it rains or floods, they come visiting and leave fish offerings. That’s
GenRegs’ 196 [E]
behavior exactly. He should have posted a purple flag. Why yellow?”

“Perhaps to cover his ass for forbidding Tony Violaceus to try a rescue effort after you lost contact.”

“Tony offered to do that? Jeez! He really is a great guy.”

Seth thought he caught a faint afterthought of, “in bed, too,” but that might be his own Old Adam grumbling. “Tony could have staked the planet for Galactic while he was at it. So perhaps Duddridge didn’t want you rescued, babbling about talking otters? Your remarks from the shuttle can be dismissed as fevered delirium. He hoped to scare Mighty Mite out of sending down a shuttle, but he did not want to close the world to a later visit by Galactic. If this is the case, then he must think that there’s some value in staking this planet. And you must have found it.”

Meredith still worked for Galactic, not Mighty Mite. If she had found something valuable she might have told Duddridge and still want to keep it from Seth.

For a moment she said nothing. Then, “All we found was the centaurs, and they close down the whole planet. There’s another thing, though. Doddery might have refused Tony’s offer because he didn’t want another death on his record. He lost people on both his previous missions, and now three more. Looks bad. You agree that the centaurs are sentient?”

Seth sighed. “After watching them bring you that fish just now because they understood that you were hungry and couldn’t catch your own? You, a member of a species they had never met before? Of course I do. I think ISLA should put Cacafuego off-limits to development.”

Scientific expeditions observing from space would be all. No explorers and no missionaries. What would missionaries preach to six-limbed natives anyway?

The shuttle’s moves were becoming violent−erratic rises followed by sudden descents.

“Will Mighty Mite survive if it cannot stake the planet?”

“No. It will take ISLA years to decide whether to grant Mite a development permit or interdict Cacafuego and release the reward money. The reward won’t even cover the interest on Mite’s debts.” The publicity would help, of course, but not nearly enough. Seth’s plog would be a bestseller, as would Meredith’s, if she managed to pry the records out of Galactic. “We’ll all be celebrities for a week or two.” Especially JR. He’d love it. “And you can sue Galactic.”

“Sue but never win.”

“Oh, don’t think that. They’ll pay up millions to avoid the bad—
look out!
”

The shuttle shuddered as if it had been kicked. Then again. After a long tremor and a distant grating, tearing noise, it began to tilt.

Seth said, “Let’s move to this side, just in…”

Too late. The cabin twisted violently and arranged the move for them. He slid, stopped with a jolt, and had all his breath knocked out by ninety kilos of Meredith running into him. Then they were buried under loose bedding. They had arrived on the original floor, although it still had a steep slope. Murky green daylight poured in through a window that had been hidden until now.

The movement didn’t stop; it became a wild rocking. Clearly the front part of the shuttle had separated from the rest and was floating, basically right way up, but nose high. All that showed through the window was greenish water, with no surface or bottom in sight. He remembered that Galactic’s second shuttle had disappeared, presumed washed out to sea—not a comforting thought.

“We must do this again in cozier surroundings,” Meredith murmured.

“I guarantee full cooperation.”

They disentangled as well as they could. Was their next trial to be seasickness? Roll, yaw, rock…

Seth said, “I’m sure
Golden Hind
is tracking us. The bow should be above water. I expect the tilt comes from all that sand in the lab. I don’t think we’ll go very far, and we’re probably being swept inland. When the flood subsides, we’ll run aground.”

“A total lack of imagination is a good thing in a prospector.”

“What are you imagining?”

“Don’t ask.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t have to.

Their impromptu submarine continued its erratic motion, starting to spin as well as rock. It would meet no floating tree trunks, but it was moving so fast that any large rock could burst it open and sink it.

When humans couldn’t play sex games or power games, they normally just chattered. So he chattered.

“Female prospectors are rare.”

“Yes.”

He waited.

“And most people called Meredith are herms? That what you’re wondering?”

“But too polite to ask.”

“I was named after my Uncle Auntie. My father was junior prospector on JKV’s
Harmonious Chariot
. My mother was senior astrobiologist. They hit it off tops. They both wanted to make me a herm, but deep-space ships don’t carry prenatal herm drugs. So here I am, permanently overwhelmed in the action.”

“I don’t mind underwhelming if you want a change. Born where?”

“On Earth. In Sweden.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“Mother’s still around, teaching at UNU. Father made the second descent to Blue Lantern.”

“Um, quicksand, right?” It was a classic deep-space horror story. Twenty-odd years ago, so she could have no memory of him.

She nodded. “The first team landed on what looked like a beach beside a small lake and the shuttle sank in up its wings. With the jets plugged, it would have blown up if they had tried to take off. Then it started to move toward the pond. Nobody thought badly about that—quicksand is caused by underground artesian springs, so a slow flow down to the water seemed reasonable.

“Prospector Tsukuba brought the second shuttle down. He landed on the lake itself, as instructed. The plan was that he would throw ropes to the first crew, haul them off the beach, then fish them out of the water. He was standing on the wing of his shuttle, preparing to throw the first rope, when the shuttle was dragged under, and him with it. The whole thing, pond and beach, turned out to be a feeding orifice.”

“I’ve seen the plog, what there was of it. All four people died.”

“Blue Lantern was one of the bad ones, but we may match it. Ask me tomorrow.”

“My immediate worry is getting seasick,” Seth said.

They lay in silence for a while. He was physically exhausted, and had been running on his nerves for hours. Even so, he could not sleep in this blender.

Yet he must have dozed for a few minutes, because he was suddenly aware of Meredith tugging at her sheet.

“Right, Quasimodo.” Her voice was slurred. “Pull out your rope and bells and start humping.”

“Never met anyone as romantic as you, Juliet.”

“I mean it, Stud.” This was the stim shot speaking. “May be the last chance we’ll ever have and I am hot to trot, ripe to rape, frantic to—”

“Not now! Wait until we’re safely on
Golden Hind
, fed and clean and comfortable. Then I’ll be at your service. All you can eat. These little piggies can go
‘Oo! Oo! Oo!’
all the way home.”

She muttered something inaudible. Her eyes stayed closed.

More light was coming in the window. Their submarine was rocking, pitching, and spinning even more violently in waves near the surface. Weeds were streaming past the glass. They looked like that ferny ground cover, so it was the shuttle that was moving at such an alarming rate, and the water wasn’t very deep.

Then
thump!
The stern had grounded. Crunching noises. More violent thumps, felt in every bone he possessed. The light brightened.

“That’s good,” he said. “We’re surfacing.”

No answer.

Four smaller bumps and a big one and all motion stopped.

The water level sank steadily down the glass.

Seth swallowed his heart back where it belonged. “Please remain seated with your safety web fastened until the shuttle has come to a complete stop at the terminal building.”

The cabin was resting on its belly, almost level. The door that had been in the ceiling was now at the far side of the room, easily accessible.

He waited to make sure that there were no more surprises coming but his eyelids started drooping, so he sat up. Having made sure Meredith was comfortable and not likely to choke, he rose to peer out the window. All he could see was rain and an extremely rough wall, reminiscent of a coral reef, decorated with “moss” and “barnacles”. He could guess what that was.

He might be going to survive this crazy adventure after all.

He dug through the litter to find his headband, then walked up the slant of the deck to the corridor door. And hesitated. The corridor might be full of water. There had been two dead bodies in the shuttle before it broke apart. He did not know their present whereabouts, and they would be in loathsome condition after three weeks of unrelenting heat. The door opened easily to his touch. He detected no foul stench of death.