Seas of Venus (6 page)

"Any damn thing that moves."

"Watch it," the ensign in the cockpit ordered.

Dan glanced sideways toward his nephew. "Remember," he said, "this is who you get crewing hydrofoils. Don't ever pretend people are going to be other than you
know
they're going to be."

L7521 slammed past the islet, her drive noise echoing as a
thrum/thrum/thrum
from the vegetation. The vessel's outriggers threw up triple roostertails. The wakes hunched waist-high across the shallows, churning mud from the bottom.

A ripple of fans waved nervously, the raking gills of giant barnacles or tube-worms.

A tentacle—a tendril?—shot out of the forest toward the L7521. It was gray and featureless, suggesting neither the plant kingdom nor the animal. Everything behind the rounded tip was a twisting cylinder a yard in circumference. The creature's lunge carried it a hundred feet over the water churned by the disappearing hydrofoil.

A sailor on the stern rail fired his machine-gun. The pintle-mounted weapon wobbled, throwing its helix of golden tracers above the creature. Johnnie, glancing over his shoulder at the target his own weapons wouldn't bear on, thought a few of the bullets might possibly have hit.

Possibly.

"What was it?" Johnnie asked.

"Cover your sector," his uncle ordered, gesturing the twin mount forward as his right hand returned the rifle to the slot beside his seat. "Don't worry about the stuff that's over."

"Yessir," Johnnie muttered, his face cold. The hydrofoil banked slightly, hiding the creature which was already withdrawing into the vegetation from which it had sprung.

Uncle Dan grinned. "Good job, John," he said. "A lot of veterans would've shot off ammo they might need later."

"I won't get out of position again . . . sir," Johnnie said.

"Wish I was sure that
I
wouldn't," Dan said.

The older man looked back past the stern, where even the islet was rapidly disappearing. "What was it?" he added. "Something big and nasty and fast. But not fast enough. May all our problems be like that."

"Uncle Dan," Johnnie said, keeping his eyes rigidly on his sight hologram. "Is the Senator a coward?"

"Arthur?" the mercenary officer said. "Hell no! Where did you get that idea?"

"He joined the Blackhorse when you did—"

"Right. He met your mother when she was seeing me off for training."

"—but he resigned after his first battle. He was afraid."

"He wasn't any more scared than I was," Dan said. "The
Elizabeth
got hammered out of line. Damned lucky we weren't sunk. . . ."

He put his arm on Johnnie's shoulder and kept it there until the younger man met his eyes. "Listen to me, Johnnie," Dan went on. "Arthur's first battle convinced him that Venus had to be united, so that some day there wouldn't
be
any battles. That doesn't make him a coward."

Johnnie nodded. "But he was wrong, wasn't he? I mean, you can't change human nature, can you?"

Dan grinned without humor. "I hope Arthur wasn't wrong," he said. "Because it convinced me of the same thing."

The Devil is driving both this tide,
and the killing-grounds are close,
And we'll go up to the Wrath of God. . . . 
 

—Rudyard Kipling

Fifteen miles from the Braids, Johnnie cranked up the gunsight magnification and added computer enhancement to eliminate the haze. He panned the guns slowly for an early view of the band of swampy islands and shallow channels through which L7521 would pass. Beside him, Dan dictated into a pocket workstation.

A command overlay pulsed slowly in the upper right quadrant of the gunsight hologram, then disappeared.

Johnnie blinked. He reached for the keyboard—and remembered he was in a gun tub, not at a control console. He slapped down his visor, manually keyed his helmet's access channel, and said to the artificial intelligence, "Review past minute's visuals."

The helmet went
eep
and projected what Johnnie had seen a minute before into his visor. The visor image formed a ghost over the nearly identical view currently in the gunsight, but this time Johnnie was ready for the warning pulse.

Dan put the pocket unit away and watched intently as his nephew worked.

"Sir," Johnnie said, "we've been painted by radar."

As he spoke, the pulsed overlay reappeared in the gunsight, echoing the data sent to the main unit in the cockpit.

Dan touched his helmet keypad and said, "Twin mount to bridge. We're under radar observation. Over."

"Bridge to twin mount," replied Ensign Samuels in a wary voice. "We're approaching the Braids. You're—"

Samuels remembered who was on the other end of the link. "You may be seeing reflections scattered from islets. Over."

"Negative!" Johnnie hissed, bending close to his uncle to avoid using the intercom. "That's—"

"Bridge, that's a negative," Dan said sharply. "That's track—"

"—track-while-scan!" Johnnie concluded, identifying the pattern of high-power and low-power pulses which swept the torpedoboat.

"—while-scan," Dan continued. "Who the hell do you have on your EW board? Over."

Details sharpened in the view of the islands toward which L7521 sped. Computer enhancement at long range smoothed objects into a calculated sameness. As the need for enhancement lessened, the foliage appeared in its spiky, curling multiplicity.

There were mangroves and a breeze riffling reed tops into amber motion; but there was no sign of man.

"Shit!" said Ensign Samuels.

Then, in a controlled voice, the torpedoboat's commander continued, "Bridge to twin mount. Sir, the electronic warfare console was disconnected. The console is operating again now. You—"

Operating now that it's too late, Johnnie thought.

"—were right, of course. Over."

"Samuels," Dan said, "ask Captain Haynes to lock into Intercom 3, please.
Soonest
!"

The click of another station joining Johnnie and his uncle cut off the first syllable of Captain Haynes' voice saying, "—mander, is this some joke of yours?"

Dan rose to his feet and looked toward the cockpit. Haynes was standing also; their eyes met. Johnnie glanced from one man to the other—and turned back to the holographic display.

"No joke, Captain," Dan said. "If you haven't decided to lay on an escort for us—"

" . . . f course not!" Haynes' protest was stepped on by the ongoing transmission.

"Then we have to assume that somebody's stationed here to make sure that you and I don't get to Blackhorse Base," Dan said. "Tell Bradley to turn ten degrees to port so we're headed toward Channel 17 instead of 19. That should get us more sensor data."

Johnnie ran a chart of the Braids on his visor. If he flexed his helmet to the tit on the gun mount, he could convert the sight into an omni-function display—

But right at the moment, it looked as though having the gunsight working was more important.

"I can't believe either the Warcocks or Flotilla Blanche would act so dishonorably!" Haynes said.

L7521's front foil nosed into the turn. The port stern outrigger telescoped enough to keep the deck more or less perpendicular to the "down" of centrifugal force; the torpedoboat heeled like a motorcycle.

The Braids were a thousand square miles of weathered pillow lava over which the sea had risen at the end of the terraforming process. The result was thousands of islands, ranging in size from specks to narrow blotches that straggled along for several miles at low water.

None of the land rose more than ten feet above the level of high tide; none of the channels wandering through the mass was more than twenty feet deep when the solar tide was at its lowest; and the sum of land and water together was very nearly mean sea level. The through-channels were numbered, but no one had bothered to name any of the swampy islands.

"Do you think the people running Carolina Dome are that honorable, Captain?" Dan said sharply. "You know as well as I do that some of the smaller mercenary companies are no better than pirates, picking up salvage on the fringes when the big fleets engage. A few politicians could hire one of them under the table. . . ."

Johnnie touched his helmet keypad and whispered orders to the artificial intelligence. His gunsight, at full magnification, was centered on the point at which the target should first appear. The sight picture was still an empty channel choked from either side by black mangroves, but the electronic warfare suite was beginning to draw a picture of the ambusher.

Radar signals from the other craft located the emitter but could not identify the hull on which the radar was mounted. When the waiting vessel started its engines in reaction to the torpedoboat's course change, L7521's passive sensors fed back the faint sound signatures for comparison to known templates.

When the vessel moved—out of Channel 17 and away from the hydrofoil rather than on a direct interception course—the torpedoboat's data bank achieved a 98 percent probable identification. The lurking vessel was a surface skimmer whose flexible skirts balanced it above the water on a cushion of air.

The air cushion worked as well on land as water. In shifting away from L7521, the skimmer slid over a neck of land which the chart showed as being above water level at the present tidal state. The ambusher settled again in a slough connected to Channel 19.

"Sir," Dan said, "I have small-craft experience that you don't. Ensign Samuels will of course command his vessel . . .  but with your permission, I'll take overall control of the operation."

Johnnie risked a glance around to see the captain's face, raised above the cockpit coaming. The rivalry between Cooke and Haynes was as bitter as many religious conflicts; but the men were, literally, in the same boat.

Haynes licked his lips. "We can't turn and run, then?" he said.

"From their acceleration," Dan said, proving that he'd kept an eye on his visor display while talking to his superior, "they're running light—no torpedoes. They'll have at least thirty knots on us, flat out. Our best hope is that they don't know we've noticed them."

"All right, Cooke," said Captain Haynes. He swallowed. "You're in operational command. I'll make room here in the cockpit."

"No time, Captain," Dan said as he tried to unscrew the cap which protected the hard-wire connector on the gun mount. It stuck. "I'll run it from here, if—"

Johnnie rapped the cap twice, sharply, with the butt of his service knife.

His uncle twisted again. The cap spun loose from the grip of microlife which had managed to root into the threads of supposedly impervious plastic.

"I'll run it from here," Dan concluded as he pulled glass-fiber line from the tit and connected it to his helmet.

L7521 rushed toward the Braids at seventy knots. Channel 17 wasn't an ideal route since it narrowed halfway through the mass to little more than the width of the torpedoboat. That was something to worry about
if
they got so far.

Dan converted the gunsight display to a holographic chart of a square mile of the Braids. A blue line and a red bead plotted the torpedoboat's planned course and the ambusher's location, respectively.

Johnnie swallowed and flipped up the twin mount's mechanical backsight. Blurred vegetation hopped and quivered through the sighting ring. The mechanical sights were for emergencies only—

And the lord knew, this was an emergency.

"Three to bridge," Dan said. "Is the Automatic Defense System—"

As the commander spoke, the miniature four-barreled Gatling roused on the centerpost of the cockpit coaming.

"—right, we need it live," Dan said approvingly. "Now, take us up Channel 18 instead. Over."

"Sir," Samuels blurted, "that's blocked—" Then, "Aye-aye, sir. Sorry."

The ADS fired high-velocity 50-grain flechettes. The unit had its own scanner and, when live, operated independently to engage any target that came within a hundred yards of the torpedoboat on an intercepting course. The weapon was switched off at most times—it would riddle an approaching admiral's car in harbor as cheerfully as it would bat a hostile missile—but it gave the torpedoboat a modicum of protection against guided weapons in combat.

"Sir?" Samuels added. "We'll have to throttle back to make the chicane at the mouth of Eighteen. Over."

"That's fine, Ensign," Dan replied absently as the AI ran possible scenarios, one after another, on the sight display. "So long as we don't try to run, it'll just look as though we're having problems with our charts. Over."

He looked at Johnnie, keyed intercom, and muttered, "Which thank god we're not. These charts—"

Dan nodded toward the holographic web of waterways. The glowing blue line—L7521—maneuvered against the red line of the surface skimmer, until a line of red dots joined the two.

The blue line ended.

"—are all that's going to save us. If anything does."

He grinned at his nephew. "That and you spotting the radar signal when whoever was at the EW console slept."

"Is Haynes sitting at that console?" Johnnie asked.

Dan shook his head. On the display's next scenario, the blue line cut across a reed bed that Johnnie didn't think was a channel.

It
wasn't
a channel. The line carried forward on inertia, then stopped—hopelessly aground. Red dots indicating gunfire from the ambusher touched the point which marked the torpedoboat.

A new scenario began.

"I don't like Haynes," Dan said. "But he's a fanatic about getting whatever job's in front of him done. By the book—but done."

The low-lying islands formed a mottled backdrop to the display now. Through the cut-out in the hologram for the iron sights, Johnnie scanned the foliage for any sign of the surface skimmer.

Nothing. Of course nothing. You could hide a battleship, much less an air cushion vehicle, among the dense vegetation of the Braids.

The ambush might very well have gone unnoticed—until it was sprung. Personnel on a boat ferrying people back from leave couldn't be expected to be very alert.