Seas of Venus (27 page)

Dan grinned at him.

Haynes' face suffused with blood and rage. He closed his mouth like a door slamming.

The Admiral turned in his seat. His expression was unreadable. He looked up at the plotting display, then lowered his eyes to his executive officer.

"Yes," he said as the eighteens fired. His lips seemed to be slightly out of synch because his voice came over the radio a microsecond sooner than air would have transmitted the words. "Let's end this, shall we?"

Dan waited an instant to be sure that he, rather than Admiral Bergstrom, was to give the order. Then, with a wink to Captain Haynes, he keyed his console and said, "Blackhorse Six to El Paso element. General Chase. I say again, General Chase. Let's have 'em for breakfast, boys! Out!"

As a period to the command, the secondary magazines of a ship near the center of the Warcock line blew up. For a moment, inertia held the dreadnought on course. Her superstructure was missing and there was a scallop from the middle of her hull as though she were a minnow bitten by a piranha.

The stricken vessel slewed to the side. Her bow listed to starboard, her stern to port.

"Sir!" said a communications tech. "The Warcocks are calling for you on Frequency 7 to discuss surrender. Shall I transfer the call?"

Another heavy shell burst, close enough to be felt but still harmlessly far in the air.

"Yes, yes, of course!" Bergstrom snapped, prodding at his console with what seemed to Johnnie to be drunken precision.

"Blackhorse to all Blackhorse elements," Uncle Dan said. "Cease firing offensive—"

The booming main guns from the battleship immediately to starboard rocked the
Semiramis
.

"—weapons. They're giving up! Cease—"

Captain Haynes rose from his seat. "You have no right to give that order, Cooke!" he shouted.

"—fire, they're surrendering. Out."

The hammering snarl of the railguns was a reminder that at this range, shells would continue to fall for almost a minute—on the Blackhorse and on their opponents.

Flashes covered the stern of another Warcock dreadnought on the display. When the blasts ended, the guns of Y Turret were cocked sideways and the deck aft was a smoking shambles.

Uncle Dan stood up. He moved gracefully and at seeming leisure, like a cat awakening. "Do you have something to say to me, Captain Haynes?" he said.

The railguns cut off. Instead of silence, the bridge filled with the sound of a voice rasping from the roof speaker, "—der unconditionally to you, Admiral Bergstrom. We, I . . ."

The voice broke. Whether it was Admiral Helwig or subordinate promoted into his place by Blackhorse shells, there was no doubt of the sincere desperation of the Warcocks' commander.

Johnnie understood how the man must feel. All the few survivors of the
Holy Trinity
would understand that run-through-a-hammermill feeling.

Captain Haynes swallowed. "Remember we've still got Flotilla Blanche to deal with," he said. His tone was almost an apology.

He started to sit down.

"If you can spare us medical help—" the Warcock officer said.

"Admiral de Lessups can do basic math, Captain," Dan said harshly. "He can match twelve dreadnoughts against seventeen in his head—and he's not so stupid that he'll try the result for real."

"—we'd be very thankful."

Haynes' face worked. Johnnie could see that the stocky captain was still trying to disengage from an argument he had lost as soon as he opened his mouth. "We're low on main-gun ammu—"

"Not so low we can't hammer Flotilla Blanche to the bottom, Captain!" Dan shouted. His face was red, and his voice was full of the ragged fury Johnnie had heard him counterfeit in Senator Gordon's office. "They know that and we know that!
You
know it!"

"That won't be possible until we've dealt with Flotilla Blanche," said Bergstrom over the roof speaker. "As soon—"

"Commander," Haynes said, looking at his clenched fingers, "I think we're both overwrought. I think we—"

"You know what the real problem is?" Dan said rhetorically. His eyes swept the other personnel on the bridge. He waved his arm. "The
real
problem is that Haynes has learned about me and Beryl, and he's willing to give up a victory just so it won't be a victory I planned!"

Admiral Bergstrom turned around and snapped, "Hold it down, for God's sake!" He straightened to resume his conversation with the Warcock officer.

Several of the listening officers gasped or turned away. Johnnie would have felt shock himself if he were able to feel any emotion at the moment.

Captain Haynes blinked. He was no longer angry; amazement had driven out every other reaction.

"Cooke," he said in wonderment, "were you wounded in the head? That's ridiculous."

Uncle Dan took a step forward and reached out. His index finger pressed the touch-plate of the visicube on the plotting table. He backed away.

"You may proceed to your home port—" Admiral Bergstrom was saying.

"Dan, darling, dearest Dan," squeaked the voice from the image of Beryl Haynes. "I wish you were here with me now so that you could kiss—" 

"—leaving only enough undamaged vessels at sea to aid those—"

Haynes went red, then white. Johnnie could barely see the seated captain past his uncle's torso.

"—my nipples, so that you could—" 

"—which are in danger of sinking," said the Admiral's voice.

Haynes lurched to his feet. His hand groped at his pistol holster.

"—bite my nipples the way—" 

"I'm unarmed!" Dan shouted. He raised his hands from elbow level. His holster hung from the chair behind Haynes.

Captain Haynes swung up his pistol.

Johnnie's face was calm, his mind empty of everything but trained reflex. He drew and fired twice over his uncle's shoulder.

Haynes' head swelled as both bullets exploded within his brain.

"—that's ecstasy for me . . ." concluded the visicube.

Haynes' arms, flailing as he fell, brushed the image of his wife to the floor.

Johnnie's fingers began to load a fresh magazine into his pistol.

When navies are forgotten
And fleets are useless things,
When the dove shall warm her bosom
Beneath the eagle's wings.
 

—Frederic Lawrence Knowles

Torpedoboat D992's auxiliary thruster was turning at idle, enough to make the water bubble beneath her stern and to take the slack out of the lines. Despite that, if any of the vessel's crew were anxious for their passenger to come aboard, they took pains to conceal the fact.

Johnnie, wearing civilian clothes, and Captain Daniel Cooke in a clean uniform with the tabs of his new rank on its collar paused beneath a tarpaulin for a moment. The sun was a white hammer in the sky, but the storm sweeping west from the Ishtar Basin would lash Blackhorse Base before the afternoon was out.

Heavy traffic sped up and down the quays, carrying materials to repair battle damage and supplies to replace the enormous quantities used up in the action of the previous night. None of the men or vehicles came near the end of Dock 7 where the D992 waited.

Dan said, "I don't want you to misunderstand, John. You can't stay with the Blackhorse, but I can get you a lieutenant's billet with any other fleet on Venus. Flotilla Blanche, for—"

"No," Johnnie said sharply.

He looked at his uncle, then focused on the lowering western horizon. "I wanted to learn what it was like to be a mercenary," he said. "Now I know."

His lips twisted and he added to the black sky, "I thought the Senator was a coward because he left after one battle."

"I told you that wasn't so," said Uncle Dan.

Johnnie met the older man's eyes. "You told me a lot of things!" he snarled.

"Yes," Dan replied calmly. "And none of them were lies."

A railcar carrying a section of armor clanked along the lagoon front, toward the drydock where the
Hatshepsut
was refitting from her torpedo damage. The dreadnought's gunnery control board had gone down at a critical time. Before the secondary armament could be switched to another console, a pair of Warcock torpedoboats unloaded their deadly cargo.

"Not lies?" the youth said. "Maybe not—by your standards, Uncle Dan."

Then, as his eyes blurred with memories, he said, "You
used
me. From the time you talked to the Senator, you were planning—what I did!"

"For eight years," Dan said coolly, "I've been raising you to be the man I'd need at my side when there was no one else I could trust. I never forced you to do anything—but I wanted you to have the chance to be the man I needed,
if
you had the balls for it."

"Oh, I've got the balls, Uncle Dan," Johnnie retorted. "What I
don't
have is the stomach. I see why you had to get rid of Captain Haynes—he was a normal human being. But I don't—"

The youth been speaking in a controlled if not a calm tone. Now his voice broke.

"—see why you had to pick me to murder him. Wouldn't Sergeant Britten have dropped him in the lagoon some night for you?"

"Captain Haynes killed himself," Dan said. "He'd be alive today if he'd been a man in whose hands the fate of Venus could rest safely."

"He was a decent man!"

"Venus isn't a decent planet, boyo!" the older man snapped. "It's a hellhole—and it's all Mankind has left. I'll pay whatever it costs to be sure that Venus is unified before somebody uses the atomic weapons they figure they need to win a war."

Lightning backlit one, then several of the oncoming cloud masses. Their gray-and-silver forms looked like fresh lead castings. Thunder was a reminder of distant guns firing.

Johnnie stared toward the clouds but at the past. "I don't care if Venus is ever unified," he said flatly. "I just don't want to see more men die."

"Well, you ought to care, boy," said his uncle in a voice like a cobra's hiss, "because if we don't have unity, we won't have peace; and if we don't have peace on this planet, then there's going to be two temporary stars orbiting the sun instead of just one."

Johnnie turned to Dan and blazed, "You don't make peace by killing people,
Captain
!"

Dan nodded. "Fine, boy," he said in the same cold tone. "Then you go down to the domes and help the Senator unify the planet his way—or some way of your own. It doesn't matter how you do it. But don't forget, boy: it has to be done, whatever it takes."

Johnnie closed his eyes, then pressed his fingers over them. It didn't help him blot out the visions that haunted his mind.

He spun around, though Dan had surely seen the tears dripping from beneath the youth's hands.

"Johnnie," said his uncle in a choking voice, "I told you there were costs. I didn't lie to you!"

I thought you meant I might be killed
, Johnnie's mind formed, but he couldn't force the words through his lips.

He stumbled toward the hydrofoil waiting to carry him back to Wenceslas Dome.

"Whatever it takes!" his uncle shouted.

And the thunder chuckled its way across the sky.

There was an instant of silence as the salvo of 8-inch shells drowned their freight-train roar in the shallow water off the port side of Air Cushion Torpedoboat K67. When the shells exploded, their three blasts erupted together from the sea in a spout of sand and water. Toothed life forms snapped and tore at one another even as they seared to death in the sunlight which burned through the clouds of Venus.

"—to Orange Leader," Ensign Brainard shouted into his commo helmet. "For God's sake, Holman, we can't hold this heading! Over."

They had to veer to seaward or reverse course. They had to do
something
, and do it quick or it wouldn't matter.

When shells began to fall unexpectedly on their two-ship scouting element, Lieutenant Holman had ordered K67 and his own K70 to skim the shallow embayment of one of the nameless islands of Gehenna Archipelago. At first, the order had seemed a good idea to Brainard also. The island's central peak, wrapped in festering vegetation, should confuse the radar of the cruiser targeting the two hovercraft.

But radar was never trustworthy on Venus. Solar radiation and magnetic fields twisted radio beams into corkscrews which might or might not bounce back to the receiving antenna. This time the cruiser's luck was good, and Brainard's luck—

The shockwave hammered them.

Brainard commanded one of the smallest vessels in Wysocki's Herd—Hafner's Herd originally, but a 16-inch shell had retired Cinc Hafner. Brainard gripped the cockpit coaming and glared at the waterspout, as though his eyes could force a response from Lieutenant Holman when a laser communicator could not.

K70, their sister-ship and the patrol leader, rocked out from behind the shellbursts, holding course. Instead of taking station ahead or astern of K67, Holman held his vessel 200 yards to seaward. That might be why the cruiser was still getting a Doppler echo separated from the shore—and an aiming point.

The sky screamed with another salvo. Ahead, the further cape of the embayment approached through the haze at K67's flat-out speed of 90 knots.

"Orange Two to Orange Leader!" Brainard shouted, knowing the volume of his voice wouldn't help carry the words to K70 if the laser communicator didn't function . . . and if Lieutenant Holman didn't want to hear. "Sheer off, for God's sake! Over!"

Newton, the coxswain, steadied K67 against the airborne shockwave followed by the surge of water humping over the shallows to pound the hovercraft's skirts. A ten-foot ribbonfish, all teeth and iridescence, swept up on the narrow deck, then slid into the roiling sea again. The fish had locked its jaws onto something round and spiny. In its determination to kill, it seemed oblivious to the notch some other creature had bitten from its belly.