With the Lightnings (31 page)

The
Ahura
tilted over on her back, falling toward the lagoon where bloody, boiling water subsided. The impeller slipped from its mount and tumbled on its own course, taking Daniel with it in the instant before he let go.

He caught a glimpse of Adele in the air. Her face was set and disapproving. One of her hands gripped the computer sheathed along her right thigh; the other was in the left pocket of her tunic.

"Cinnabar!" Daniel shouted as he hit the water.

Adele supposed she ought to be thankful that the water at the edge of the beach was shallow enough that she hadn't drowned. She'd come down on her knees, though, and the shock of the water and then packed sand three feet below the surface had made her nauseated with pain.

Even now, ten minutes after Cafoldi brought her onto dry ground in a packstrap carry, she walked stiff-legged. She'd be surprised if she didn't have bruises to midway on both thighs and shins.

But she'd found her personal data unit worked perfectly despite the ducking. It was at least an open question whether or not she'd prefer to have broken her neck if the alternative was to be stranded on an island without access to civilized knowledge.

Now that Adele had the mental leisure to notice, she saw that the sailors were all at work. Apparently nobody'd been killed or even seriously injured. For the most part they'd rolled into the water before the yacht flipped in the monster's final convulsion.

Daniel stood in the shade of a tree with small leaves and ropy branches. From each tip hung a nut that grew to the size of a clenched fist. While Daniel talked to Woetjans he peeled the flexible shell of a nut with a small knife, popping bits of the white flesh into his mouth at intervals.

He broke off and grinned broadly when he saw Adele approaching. "You ran your data link through its paces?" he called.

"Yes, thank God," she said. "It's supposed to be sealed against worse than a bath in salt water, but until I tried it I wasn't sure."

Daniel flicked off another piece of nut meat. He held it out to her between his thumb and the knife blade. She shook her head; she was still doubtful whether her modest breakfast of crackers and meat paste was going to stay down.

"What I was more worried about than damage," she went on, "was that I'd lose it and not be able to find it under water."

The
Ahura
had fallen entirely within the lagoon. The yacht's stern lay on the reef so several feet of the inverted hull were above water. Sailors diving beside the wreck were coming up with stores and equipment.

The water was a sickly green, a combination of colors leached from vegetation on the surrounding islands and the blood of the creature that had destroyed the yacht. Adele assumed the low, gray mound floating a hundred feet from the shore was the sweep's corpse.

"It's huge," she said, looking from the lagoon to Daniel. She couldn't imagine how he'd been able to aim as the
Ahura
shuddered up on end. She'd barely retained her holds on the bulkhead.

"Yes," Daniel said with a smirk of fully justified pride. "It's not a new species, I suppose, but it still should get my name into the records somewhere, don't you think? Big game hunting if not zoology texts."

He laughed with the easy assurance Adele had come to associate with him. "It was too big to ever leave the lagoon. It certainly wouldn't have had any competition for food inside the ring of the atoll, but I'll be interested to learn just what that food could be."

Barnes sat on the vessel's stern, holding tarpaulins and rope knotted into a pair of saddlebags. They hung to either side of the hull. Cafoldi, one of the divers, came up from the foul water with a shout and a submachine gun in his hand. He splashed on three limbs to the vessel and thrust the weapon into the bag on his side.

Ganser and his Kostromans kept their distance, glowering at the Cinnabars. They weren't precisely under guard, but any attempt to rush Daniel would have to get past Dasi holding an impeller by the barrel as a club and Hogg, who was trimming a point on a sapling he'd cut down with a knife much sturdier than the one in his master's hand. As a spear it looked crude, but nobody who knew Hogg would doubt it was lethal.

Lamsoe and Sun sat cross-legged on a mat of leaves cut from a parasol-shaped shrub. They were each stripping a submachine gun to its component parts. Adele obviously wasn't alone in doubting that any locally manufactured electronics, electromotive weapons included, could survive immersion in salt water.

She wasn't sure what the sailors could do to refurbish the guns, however. Flushing in fresh water, sun-drying and prayer, she supposed, but she recalled Daniel's question whether there
was
any fresh water on the island.

"Do you want me to call Kostroma City for rescue?" Adele asked quietly.

Daniel looked at her in surprise. "Good heavens, no," he said. "That'd be the same as handing ourselves over to the Alliance."

His concern broke in a smile. "We've invested quite a lot in avoiding that already. I don't think we need to give up just yet."

"I, ah . . ." Adele said. She looked at the web of jungle, then behind her to the open sea. You could sail a thousand miles across that ocean without finding land more promising than this on which she stood.

She knew that. She'd just come that thousand miles and more.

"You think we can live here indefinitely?" she said. "Well, I suppose you're the expert. . . ."

Daniel laughed aloud. "Now, did I say that I'd rather leave us here forever to rot than wait in a camp on Pleasaunce for an eventual prisoner exchange?" he said. "This is a delay, Adele. But we needed to lie low for a time anyway so we're not really losing anything."

He nodded toward the
Ahura
's stern. Barnes was standing, holding one end of a line over which he'd strung the bags of salvage. A sailor stood in mud to her ankles pulling the bags to the shore. Two others waited nearby to empty the gear; the divers held on to the yacht and chatted while they waited for the bags to return.

"I don't think we'll be able to use the hull," Daniel said. "It's a one-piece casting and very tough, but when the integrity's breached the core of the sandwich starts to fray. Since we can't reheat the edges to three thousand degrees Kelvin, we're better off using wood. I'm pretty sure we can get the waterjet back in operation, though, and at least one of the solar sails."

"I see," Adele said, not that she did. She stared at the jungle, visualizing a boat made of
that
.

"You can access a forestry database from here, can't you?" Daniel said. "I've only got the once-over-lightly from the
Aglaia
's library. We don't want to learn that we're building the hull of a tree whose sap makes people turn blue and die in a week."

He laughed. In the lagoon the divers were back at work, bringing up objects so disguised by clinging mud that Adele couldn't guess their identity. The atoll's outer face was clean sand and clear water, but the lagoon-side shores were gray-black muck that the ocean currents didn't reach to scour away.

"I can access any electronic information that I could have found for you while we were in Kostroma City," Adele said, feeling disassociated from the cheerful bustle about her. It was as though a thick glass wall encircled her, keeping her apart from her companions despite her presence in their midst. "I suppose there are botanical files as well as the zoological ones we've used in the past."

"You know?" Daniel said, looking out into the lagoon. He'd finished the nut; he tossed the rind into the undergrowth behind him to decay into nutrients like those that stained the still water. "If the
Ahura
hadn't been an electrofoil, we'd never have learned about the sweep. They're quite harmless to humans, you know. Though—"

His grin.

"—I wouldn't care to have gone swimming with that one."

"Yes, that's probably true," Adele said.

The contrast between her dour feelings of defeat and the cheerful optimism Daniel shared with his sailors suddenly amused her. She chuckled also. Daniel was genuinely glad to have observed a creature of previously unknown size. It had almost killed him and his companions; it had almost wrecked his plans to escape Kostroma—

But "almost" was the key word with Daniel Leary. He didn't worry about things that were past; it was at least an open question in Adele's mind whether he worried about the future either. Though she wasn't about to call him a simple man. . . .

Daniel and Woetjans were discussing food and water. Daniel nodded to the sailor's queries and clipped another ripe nut as he listened.

Adele walked past Lamsoe and Sun, stepping carefully so that the wind didn't blow sand particles from her soles over the dismantled weapons. Hogg, cleaning sap from his knife with a fibrous leaf, nodded to her, then grimaced.

Hogg had a bad bruise on the right side of his head. A film of ointment closed the scrapes and the cut above his temple, but Adele was afraid he needed better medical attention than was available here.

She stepped between Hogg and Dasi, facing the group of former prisoners. They stopped their low-voiced conversations and looked at her with a mixture of emotions. A sort of bestial
hunger
was part of the brew she saw now in the thugs' eyes.

Adele smiled. It was her usual version, an expression nobody could mistake for good-humored.

"You'll have noticed that all the guns were soaked when the boat was wrecked," Adele said. "You may believe that they won't work until they're properly cleaned, probably cleaned better than is possible here on this island."

"Mistress!" Dasi blurted in horror behind her. In the corner of her eye Adele saw Hogg move, putting a restraining hand on his companion.

Adele drew her own pistol from her jacket pocket. She fired off-hand. A bell-shaped fruit exploded on a branch twenty feet in the air, spraying pulp and seeds down onto the Kostromans. Ganser shouted and covered his bald scalp with his hands.

"My gun was made on Cinnabar," she said. "It works quite well."

Adele slid the weapon back into her pocket. "And so do I," she added over her shoulder as she returned to Daniel's side.

Sunlight awakened Daniel. It filtered through the shelter of leaves and saplings his ratings must have built around him while he was asleep.

"Why didn't—" Daniel said as he sprang upright. Every muscle in his body, particularly the big ones in his thighs and shoulders, grabbed him simultaneously. It was like being attacked by a platoon of madmen with icepicks.

"Mary Mother of God!" Daniel cried tightly. His mouth would have been content to scream instead.

Overwhelming pain had made his eyes blink closed. Memory painted across the inside of his eyelids an image of himself forty feet in the air, wrapped around the shuddering gun mount.

Daniel Leary had done amazing things yesterday, he'd tell the
world
he had, but exertion like that came with a price tag. He was paying it now.

"We thought you could use your beauty sleep, sir," said Woetjans, seated with her back to the shelter's end post. She stood easily and offered Daniel her hand.

"I'm not proud," he muttered. He took Woetjans's callused grip as a brace to hold him as his legs levered him upright.

After the first instant, it wasn't too bad. The first instant felt like the madmen had exchanged their icepicks for flensing knives.

He laughed at Woetjans's concerned expression. "Remind me to get into shape before the next time I go out for trapeze," he said. "I'll be all right, I'm just stiff."

Very carefully Daniel stretched, locking his fingers behind his neck and arching his spine backward. He'd moved the detachment into a natural clearing formed by a protrusion of the igneous rock around which the island had grown. The ground cover was low-growing and soft. The hard rock wouldn't support larger vegetation, and the canopies of surrounding trees shaded but didn't cover the sky.

"Ganser's lot buggered off in the night," Woetjans said. "I don't guess that's much loss. They took a case or two of rations, but we had all the guns under guard with us."

"I wonder where they think they're going to go?" Daniel said with a frown. He didn't understand the situation, so it worried him. The Kostroman thugs had scarcely seemed the sort who'd be ashamed to take charity from a Cinnabar contingent which was obviously more competent at living rough.

"I told the crew to make sure they're always two together, even if they're just going around the next tree to take a leak," Woetjans said. "If anybody runs into a problem with the wogs, then I guess we'll finish things the way we could've done back on Kostroma."

Lamsoe and Sun, the detachment's armorer and armorer's mate by necessity, were in the clearing working on the guns. Daniel had seen enough of the pair to respect their competence but, like Adele, he very much doubted that the weapons
could
be safely reconditioned under the present circumstances.

"Where's Ms. Mundy?" he asked. He heard ratings calling from the forest, gathering food from the species he'd indicated before the sudden tropic nightfall of the previous day. They'd begun cutting wood besides. Rhythmic axe blows rang from deeper in the forest.

Hogg lay on a leaf mat, beneath a shelter like the one that had covered Daniel. At intervals Sun leaned over and mopped Hogg's face and mouth with a damp rag. Hogg was breathing hoarsely and, for the first time in Daniel's recollection, looked his age.

"She went back to the beach for a better line to the satellites she's using," Woetjans said, also a little grimmer for viewing Hogg. "There's six ratings there on the salvage detail, so no wog's going to catch her alone."

The big bosun's mate shook her head. "Mind, I'd bet her against the whole lot of them. She surprised the living shit outa me, she did."

"Yeah," said Daniel. "Me too."

He shrugged, loosening his muscles a little more. "I'm going to take her on a tour of the neighborhood," he said. "She can get me details on the wildlife through her computer."

Daniel grinned and added, "And she can be my bodyguard, so don't put on that sour expression, Woetjans. The rest of the detachment has its duties laid out, so I'm the party best spared for scouting."