Adele sat in the swivel chair that unfolded from the right side of the bow, comparing the atoll before her with the image projected from the little computer in her lap. The seat and the similar one across the deck were intended for sport fishermen; each was fitted with a rail and safety belt. Even now as the Ahura slid toward the shore on inertia alone, Adele felt better when she was strapped in.
Daniel was at the controls again. Cafoldi stood in the extreme bow, shading his eyes with an arm as he peered toward the water ahead. The Ahura had electronic depth-ranging equipment of the standard to be expected on a luxury yacht, but none of the navy men trusted it.
"Ease her right!" Cafoldi called. The Ahura rode a flat, crackling bubble of electricity. At this slow speed, the ozone which the system generated wasn't blown astern. Adele's nostrils wrinkled. "That's it, just a cunt hair!"
Lamsoe stood at the automatic impeller, scanning the shore. Most of the sailors were armed and on deck, some of them aiming toward the vegetation. Adele wasn't sure whether they were really concerned about a threat from the island or if they were just showing off with the armament they'd captured from Kostromans of various stripe. It seemed an empty exercise to her.
According to the satellite image, the atoll was comprised of a ring of eight islands connected by reefs. All Adele saw from the sea was a heavily overgrown hump against the lighter green of the water. Small birds flitted from the twisted shrubbery to the sea and back, dipping among the insects; their larger ocean-coursing brethren circled high overhead.
The Ahura glided toward the spill of tawny sand at the island's left end. Still farther left, water frothed in the currents and occasionally showed the teeth of the coral which combed just below its surface. The next island of the chain was a quarter mile beyond, shimmering like a mirage in the sea haze and the noonday sun.
The Ahura's static fields collapsed. She slid onto the beach, her hull grinding softly on the coral sand. Daniel threw switches in the cockpit, shutting down all the yacht's driving systems.
Adele felt enormous relief at the removal of the high-frequency tremble that had been a part of her existence for the day and a quarter of high-speed running. She'd become aware of the vibration only now that it stopped, but it had been present all the time—creating discomfort that she'd blamed on psychological factors.
"All right, let's get this cargo off-loaded!" Woetjans ordered. "Port watch, haul them up from the bilge; starboard watch stay on guard."
Adele put her computer away and unstrapped herself. Insects glittered silently in the air, sometimes lighting on her skin with a ghost touch. One brushed her eye; she grimaced and blinked rapidly in an attempt to wash it away.
Daniel came forward to join her. "Lovely, isn't it?" he said. "A real paradise. Of course, I don't suppose our prisoners are going to feel that way about it."
"I'm on their side," Adele said dryly. "Thus far it reminds me of the unsorted storage in the subbasement of the Academic Collections building, bugs and all. Mind, the lighting's a lot better."
She waved her hand in front of her to keep more of the minute insects from landing on her face. It was like trying to sweep back the tide.
Cinnabar crewmen were bringing the prisoners up from below. Ganser and his thugs looked sickly and gray. They'd remained trussed like hogs throughout the run with only minimal time on deck for sanitation.
"Of course," Adele added, "some of them may be smart enough to remember what the alternative was. I doubt it. People like that prefer to invent realities in which they're always in the right."
"Not only people like that," Daniel said with a smile.
Four sailors hopped to the sand. Four others on deck took the bound prisoners by the shoulders and ankles and tossed them over the side. Adele blinked in surprise. She'd wondered how the thugs would be landed, but she hadn't expected anything so brutally efficient.
Although . . . it wasn't actually brutal. The Cinnabars treated their captives like so many full duffelbags, but the sailors on the ground caught each flung body and lowered it to the sand brusquely but gently. Most of the sailors would have been willing to put Ganser and his killers over the side in deep water, but needless cruelty wasn't a part of their character.
The sea moved in long swells, licking the shore of the island and surging against the reef. The water of the lagoon stood still and jewel-like, unmarred even by diving seabirds. It was dark blue in contrast to the pale green of the open ocean.
"Where do you want to go now?" Adele asked Daniel quietly. Most of the prisoners had been unloaded; Hogg walked among them with a pair of wire-cutters, snipping the bonds from their wrists and ankles. The Kostromans remained where they lay, perhaps unable as well as unwilling to rise while their captors grinned at them over gunsights.
"We'll get over the horizon before I decide," Daniel said. "Probably on a completely different course. I think we're all right, but I don't care to test our luck needlessly."
Adele nodded. She'd set the base unit in the Elector's Palace to search message traffic, Alliance and Kostroman alike, for any reference to Cinnabar, Daniel Leary, or Adele Mundy. She then used her personal data unit to scroll through the literally thousands of references to Cinnabar. Neither of the individual names had rated a mention.
And no reference to Cinnabar involved Daniel's detachment. He and his companions, Adele included, had dropped out of existence so far as anyone else on this planet was concerned.
The captives were all freed. The sailors reboarded the Ahura, grabbing the chromed rail at the deck's edge and hauling themselves up with a quick kick against the side of the hull. Dasi got a hand from his mate Barnes, but only Hogg bothered to use the ladder attached to the vessel's side.
"Woetjans, toss them a carton of rations," Daniel ordered. He faced the Kostroman thugs, his hands on his hips.
"I'm leaving you a little food," he said. "After that, you'll have to make do with what you find. There may not be fresh water here, but there's fruit and several of these plant species excrete salt to store water in their trunks."
He smiled brightly. "I hope you're up on your native biota," he said. "It's a fascinating one."
"You can't just leave us!" Ganser said.
"Oh, I certainly could," Daniel said. "But in fact I'll let people back in Kostroma City know where you are in thirty days or so. Of course, I can't guarantee that any of them will care."
Two sailors pitched a case of rations to the sand at Ganser's feet. The wood broke and steel cans rolled out.
Daniel turned. "Prepare to get under way!" he ordered. "I'll take the helm."
"The nozzle's clear, sir!" called Dasi, leaning over the stern to peer into the crystalline water. With the bow well up on the shore, Daniel preferred to drag the Ahura backwards with the waterjet rather than try to tickle a sufficient charge into dry sand.
"Everybody who doesn't have a job move back to the stern!" Woetjans ordered, a sensible command and one Daniel should have thought to give himself. The ratings trotted aft, lowering the stern by their weight and so lightening the portion of the vessel that was aground.
Daniel slowly advanced the throttle. He'd rotated the nozzle. The jet spewed forward, making the hull vibrate as though a hose were playing on the vessel's underside. The Ahura slid back in a boil of water, scrunching for the first few feet of her motion and then floating free.
Daniel chopped the throttle, looking over his shoulder to be sure that they were drifting clear and weren't about to hit something. He couldn't see behind because the crew was standing along the stern rail, but somebody would have shouted a warning if there was a problem.
On shore, the Kostromans glared at the vessel with undisguised hate. Adele stood at the rear of the cockpit. Daniel caught her eye and said, "There's plenty of natural food on the island, but I wonder whether that lot isn't more likely to try cannibalism instead?"
Adele sniffed. "For people of their sort," she said, "I suppose cannibalism is natural."
The yacht had left the sand at a slight angle. She now floated parallel to the shore and was beginning to curve back on her remaining momentum. "Spread yourselves out," Daniel ordered. "I'm going to bring her up on the skids."
He engaged the electrofoils while the ratings were still spreading forward. They moved with less immediacy than they'd run to the stern. The skids shuddered, but Daniel didn't hear a grinding as he had the first time he'd deployed them. Scale and caked lubricant had loosened with use; the Ahura was in better condition than she'd been in some while, probably since she was laid up.
Daniel Leary was in better shape than he'd been in a long while too. There was no worse way to treat tools or men than to leave them to rust.
The yacht lifted. Daniel knew he could trust the mechanism now, so he brought her directly into dynamic balance on the skids instead of waiting until the Ahura was under way on the waterjet. They were alone in this sea. They didn't need to adjust their conduct to the comfort of neighboring vessels.
"Clear at the bow, sir!" Cafoldi said; rote, since there was no doubt of the fact. A good crew handled even the most cut-and-dried operations by the book, never cutting corners.
Daniel twisted the joystick slightly to port, then increased the throttle pressure minusculely. The yacht wobbled ahead. The bow angled seaward. They slid past the end of the island.
"Don't forget to write!" Lamsoe called, waving to the stone-faced Kostromans twenty feet away on shore.
Spray exploded toward the Ahura. A pair of hundred-foot tentacles arched from the interior of the lagoon. The flattened tips were each the size of Daniel's torso and covered with fine cilia. They crossed the reef and seized the Ahura's starboard skid.
The yacht tilted with a wrenching clang. The electrofoils and the giant sweep's own bioelectrical charge interfered with one another. A rainbow nimbus lit the air twenty feet from the vessel's every surface.
The tentacles retracted, pulling the Ahura onto her stern. Ratings shouted curses as they went overboard. The sweep was dragging the skids and hull through the coral heads. There were a few shots, their sound almost lost in the vessel's grinding, snapping destruction.
Somebody with a submachine gun punched three holes and a spiderweb of crazing in the windshield. The pellets missed Daniel's head by less than he had time to worry about.
He let go of the joystick because whatever input he had on the yacht's controls just made things worse. Adele was spreadeagled against the cockpit's port bulkhead, gripping two handholds.
The power board shorted in blue fire as salt water reached a conduit whose sheathing had been scraped away on the coral. An instant later a generator blew explosively; foul black smoke spewed up through hatches and the fresh cracks in the decking.
Lamsoe had gone over the side at the first impact, but the automatic impeller was still on its mount. Daniel grabbed its twin spade grips. The deck was no longer down; it sloped at sixty degrees as the sweep's powerful tentacles continued to contract. The creature was tipping the Ahura on her back, using the coral reef as a fulcrum.
Daniel braced his feet against a stanchion and one of the cockpit handholds. He thumbed the plate trigger between the impeller's grips.
The gun recoiled violently but the jury-rigged mount held. The first projectiles raked water empty except for the surge and bubbles stirred by the sweep's tentacles. Daniel shot the burst on, adjusting his aim by twisting his whole body and using the gun itself as a support.
The projectiles' kinetic energy blew the lagoon into an instant fog. He continued to walk the impacts toward the memory of his target: the point where the tentacles emerged together from the lagoon.
The Ahura was nearly vertical. Men and debris floated about her in the churning sea. Daniel's right leg twisted around the gun mount, but his left foot dangled in the air.
Bright yellow blood geysered in the steam at Daniel's point of aim. Chunks of flesh, some of them bigger than a man, spun in all directions. A tentacle writhed across the water like a beheaded snake, both ends free. The other tentacle contracted in its final convulsion as the impeller emptied its magazine.
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."
Whistling and feeling better with every step—he still had a ways better to feel, he admitted—Daniel walked down the path to the beach. It was improved over the simple trackway they'd forced through the undergrowth the day before. The yacht hadn't carried machetes or axes, but the ratings had improvised.
Adele sat at the edge of the beach, her back to a tree with knobby joints in its trunk. Her legs splayed out before her instead of being crossed. As he'd expected, the personal data unit was on her lap and the wands in her hands. She didn't notice Daniel's arrival till Barnes shouted a greeting from the Ahura's upturned hull.
"I'm downloading everything I can find on Kostroman botany," she said by way of greeting. Despite the brusque opening, she'd smiled to see him up and about. "The files are an awful tangle. Everything on this planet is an awful tangle."
"That's why they need experts from Cinnabar," Daniel said cheerfully. "Let's take a walk and see if we can't do some untangling."
Adele shut her computer down and transferred it to its sheath with a stringent caution that any spacer could recognize and approve. Only then did she rise, using Daniel's offered arm as an anchor. It was like watching someone stand while wearing stilts. The two of them had stayed aboard the yacht until the instant it went over, so they'd had long dives into the water.
Daniel gestured to the left, past the salvage crew and along the lagoon side of the island. Fresh water was going to be a major concern when they left the atoll's fruit behind in their jury-rigged vessel, and barrel trees couldn't set their free-standing roots in ocean currents.
"A good thing we didn't hit the land," he said. He grinned. "Or the coral."
"When I got up this morning, I didn't think I could hurt any more than I did," Adele said as she fell clumsily into step with him. "My knees were the size of melons. By now some of the swelling's gone down and I'm almost glad that I wasn't killed."
Daniel blinked, then realized she was joking. He chuckled.
He supposed she was joking.
There was no path through the jungle anywhere on the island. Daniel would have been surprised to find it otherwise since large animals were unlikely to reach the atoll except if carried here by humans. It was fairly easy to move through the interior because the shaded undergrowth grew soft-stemmed and sickly, but to find the barrel trees they had to scout the margins.
He took the lead as they entered a thicket. The shrubs had thin, ropy stems with an explosion of green and yellow leaves at the peak fifteen feet in the air. Despite Daniel's weight, the plants resisted him like a human mob.
"How is Hogg?" Adele asked quietly from behind him.
"Not great," Daniel admitted, as he forced his way through to a less obstructive stretch of vegetation. He was sweating and breathing hard as he spread the last of the ropy shrubs for his companion.
"We can use these for fiber if we need to," he said to Adele. "Though there was plenty of spare line aboard the Ahura. That'll be simpler unless we can't locate it now."
Tiny insects shimmered about them, tickling as they drank human body oils and sometimes drowned in the droplets they craved. A wedge of lagoon entered the island here. Stalked eyes peered from the water, then vanished in bubbles and swirls of mud.
"They'll do nicely to expand our diet," Daniel said. "Crustaceans of some kind. There ought to be shellfish both here in the mud and on the ocean side."
He met Adele's eyes. "I'm worried about Hogg," he said. "He's got a concussion and there's not a damned thing we can do here except supportive treatment."
Adele gestured to her sheathed computer. "Any time you want . . ." she said.
Daniel shook his head. "No," he said. "I have responsibility for the whole detachment. Things happen in wartime."
Daniel took them inland to where they could step over the notch instead of trying to cross its original ten-foot width, even though that would have saved a hundred yards from their trek. He was sure that no major predator could have shared the lagoon with the giant sweep; but a day ago he'd have sworn that no sweep grew more than twenty feet in total length.
It wasn't as though they had a particular place to get to, after all. Daniel found two barrel trees on this side of the notch and saw another one across it. The squat trunk was hidden in the undergrowth but vast, billowing foliage marked the tree clearly.
Whenever he had a question, Adele squatted and brought out her personal data unit. When she'd come as close as she could from the parameters he gave her, she handed the miniature computer to him to refine the data.
The librarian's face as she parted with the unit was like that of a mother letting a drunken stranger hold her baby. She didn't protest, though, and only the perfect rigidity of her expression indicated the horror she must feel in her heart.
By midday they were only a few hundred yards from the sandy beach where they'd started their trek, but Daniel was even more confident that his plan of escape was practical. He could now point to the elements that would fulfill their needs instead of just being sure that he'd find them somewhere on the atoll.
"Time to head back, I think," he said. Before him was another notch into the island's fabric, this one only about five feet wide at the mouth. "I don't much like that sky."
Cumulus clouds had billowed into a wall across the western heavens. A thunderstorm had caught the Ahura on her first afternoon out of Kostroma. It was so violent that Daniel had shut down the foils, furled the solar sails, and ridden the waves for an hour and a half on waterjet alone.
"And besides, I could use some lunch," he added with a grin. "I could catch us each a mudhopper—"
He gestured to the shoreline. Eyes apparently floating on the water vanished in a swirl of mud.
"—but I'm not quite hungry enough to eat one raw."
Adele nodded. "I think I can live on stored body fat for long enough to get to the camp," she said.
She stepped aside to let Daniel lead on the way back as well. He turned—and as he did saw something in the corner of his eye.
"Ho!" Daniel said. "Oh, will you look at that? Yes, we will stop here."
He pointed down the narrow waterway to the clump of rough-barked trees some twenty feet away. On their branches grew fungus in stages of ripeness from white pimples all the way up to swollen yellow balls the size of a man's head. When fully ripe they dangled from a narrow umbilicus.
"Soap bubble fungus," Daniel explained. "It infects several species of nut trees. It doesn't seem to injure the tree seriously, so it may be a symbiotic adaptation."
Adele started to pull out her computer. "No, the Aglaia's database covered soap bubble fungus adequately," Daniel said. He spoke softly because of an instinct not to rouse danger, though at this distance he and Adele weren't in danger. "The only really important thing to know about it is that you don't want to come within ten feet of it, or twenty if you're the cautious sort."
"It's poisonous?" Adele said. Even though Daniel had told her not to bother, she was calling up information from the material she'd downloaded this morning.
Daniel grinned. The way Adele turned to her computer was instinctive too: she didn't own knowledge unless she'd seen it written. The same words from the same source had more effect written than they did spoken.
"They're delicious when ripe, I'm told," Daniel said as he continued to eye the infected grove. The fullest of the fungus bubbles seemed to quiver with internal life. That was actually possible. "They'd be eaten by every bird or animal within fifty miles before they could open, if it weren't for the beetles that live inside them."
He pointed to the darkest, ripest of the fruiting bodies. "Anything that breaches the rind is set on by a dozen or so insects with bites like red-hot pokers. There's nothing on Kostroma that deliberately opens the fungus, and animals that do so by accident can be bitten to death."
"Even humans?" Adele said, now looking toward the globular fungus. Her control wands were motionless.
"Especially humans," Daniel agreed. "There's a few cases every year, city folk having a picnic and children who haven't been trained to be careful."
He grinned broadly. "I am getting a first-hand look at Kostroman natural history, aren't I? Rather fortunate to have been wrecked here, don't you think?"
"I don't know that I'd go that far," Adele said with her dry smile, "but I'm willing to be happy for you."
The rain hit when they were halfway back. At least, Daniel noted, it did something toward washing the caked sweat from their clothing.
By the time Adele and Daniel staggered into sight of the salvage crew on the Ahura she was dizzy with . . . well, she wasn't sure where to assign causation. The pain in her arm and shoulder muscles from hanging on while the yacht thrashed in the monster's grip was a factor. Exhaustion from walking through a landscape that fought her, carrying at the same time several pounds of mud clinging to either foot, was certainly a factor also.
And she assumed that the oppressive heat and humidity were working on her as well. She'd never before been in a climate where sweat beaded and rolled down her skin because the air was too saturated to accept even the least further increment.
Adele hoped that fear of the unknown wasn't weighing on her also. She was lost in a wilderness of the mind, a place where she didn't know any of the rules. Daniel and his sailors seemed perfectly comfortable here. Perhaps they'd been trained for this sort of uncertainty, in which gunmen might walk into a library at any instant or an ugly-looking fruit could disgorge lethal insects.
It wasn't the physical environment that bothered Adele, but rather the randomness of her present life. She was used to the stress of grinding poverty and demanding work, but there'd been a sameness of existence until now. She desperately missed that predictability.
Woetjans was with the salvage crew. The bosun's mate wore a look of relief as she saw Daniel reappear from the jungle. Obviously the cycle of random disaster hadn't ended yet.
"Sir, we got a problem," Woetjans said before Daniel could catch his breath at not having to fight the vegetation for a while. "Last night those wog bastards must've got the lifeboat from the ship."
She nodded toward the Ahura. The stern seemed to have settled lower since Adele last saw it, but Barnes still perched there.
"I should've known there'd be one," Woetjans continued. "It's my own damned fault. It was in a compartment under the stern decking, but I'd never thought to wonder why the panel had a red stripe around it. Hafard found it hanging open when she was feeling around in the water this morning."
The sailors who'd been nearby on shore came close enough to listen. The pair who were diving in the lagoon paused, clinging to floats made from bundled reeds. They and Barnes looked shoreward, straining also to hear.
Woetjans handed Daniel a thin metal plate with rivet holes on either end. "This was pinned to the inside of the panel," she said. "The wogs must've known what was there all the time."
"Well, they can't go far in an inflatable boat," Daniel said. "And if . . . Oh, I see what you mean."
Adele leaned over Daniel's shoulder to read the legend on the plate. Its raised letters read:
EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT
Raft (capacity 10) and Motor
Solar Still
Emergency Radio
Fishing L . . .
"Oh," said Adele.
She took out her personal data unit and seated herself on the ground, using a case of rations as a desk. She crossed her legs reflexively. The jolt of pain from her bruises didn't hit before she'd started the movement and wasn't severe enough to prevent her from finishing it. When she was working, nothing short of decapitation was going to stop her.
Daniel and his sailors were talking and looking toward the next island of the atoll, across the line of reefs. Adele dropped into the universe of her holographic screen. The natural world sloughed from around her.
She quickly located the first mention of Daniel's detachment. It was a radioed note from an Alliance liaison officer with the port authorities in Kostroma City to his superior in the Alliance military government. Cinnabar pirates had marooned Kostroman citizens on a barren island but had been stranded on the same island themselves. The Kostromans would guide troops to destroy the pirates.
Adele smiled slightly as she noted the time slugs on that and the first followup. There'd been no action on the report for several hours. It had been received not long after midnight, and if anybody noticed it they'd put it in a class with sightings of angelic visitors.
An officer had probably come in at dawn. Shortly thereafter somebody had refined Ganser's original SOS, though the exchange wasn't recorded anywhere Adele could find it. The followup, now reporting Cinnabar naval personnel were operating on Kostroma, had been passed on to Blue Chrome Operations. The invasion force was wholly distinct from the Alliance military government here.
At this point things happened very fast and were fully recorded in electronic files from which Adele could retrieve them. The link to Ganser was still only the Ahura's emergency radio, but it and Kostroma's geopositioning satellites were adequate to the needs of the Alliance.
Adele finished her survey and leaned back with a sigh. She didn't shut down but her eyes were far enough back from the focal point that the display merged into a blur of mutually-interfering beams of coherent light.
Daniel and Woetjans were looking at her. "You've got something, Adele?" Daniel asked.
The whole detachment was now present, Hogg included. The servant looked worn, but the pupils of his eyes were the same size and he walked without help. The whole left side of his face was the livid purple yellow of a decaying bruise.
The sailors were armed, but the few who carried impellers held them by the barrel as clubs. Knives, spears, and clubs of the native wood predominated.
"Ganser is in radio contact with the Alliance military authorities," Adele said. She laid the information out as flatly and simply as possible so that she wouldn't be misunderstood. "The Kostromans are on the adjacent island, about three hundred meters from the shore nearest to this island. A platoon of Alliance commandoes in an armored personnel carrier will arrive at local midnight to kill or capture the Cinnabar naval personnel and to capture the Kostromans."
"Why so long?" Dasi asked. "An APC could make it here from Kostroma City by dusk, even if they just started."
"They want us to be asleep," Daniel guessed.
"Yes," Adele said. "Ganser warned them that we were armed. He said they should shoot us on sight and not take any chances."
"Wish we were armed," said Lamsoe. "Wish to fuck we were armed."
He looked wistfully at his impeller. A piece of flexible plastic dangled from the battery compartment. Lamsoe had disconnected the power pack so that there was no risk of his accidentally pulling the trigger and shorting the mechanism explosively.
Daniel looked at his chronometer, returned it to his pocket, and smiled purposefully to Adele and his sailors. "That gives us seven hours," he said. "Now, the first thing we'll need—"
Daniel swept the opposite shore slowly with his goggles set to maximum magnification on thermal imaging, then swept it again with the magnification backed off to normal. There was always the possibility that a glitch in the imaging software would mask a target when two systems were combined and pushed to their limits.
This wasn't a time Daniel could afford a glitch.
He took off the goggles and handed them to Woetjans, beside him in the undergrowth. The remainder of the detachment was a silent presence several feet deeper in the jungle, where the thick foliage would mask their body heat from any detection apparatus Daniel knew of. The Kostromans probably didn't have infrared equipment, but Daniel's margin of error was too slight for him to make things worse by any assumed "certainties."
"I don't see any sign of a guard," he said. "Keep watching, of course."
Daniel stretched to full height, bracing his paired hands on a treetrunk. He'd stripped to a belt, a sheath knife from one of the ratings, and his shorts. Woetjans held a long reel of fishing line whose free end was tied to Daniel's belt.
The shorts weren't for modesty but from a due concern for small swimming things that might nibble or sting in the darkness. A nipped toe wouldn't be disabling.
"I'll be off now," he said. He walked toward the water, feeling the gritty soil change to mud between his toes.
"Sir," said Woetjans as she stepped out of the undergrowth beside him. "I wish—"
"I'm the best swimmer in the detachment," Daniel said. "If there's a problem, Cafoldi's my backup. but you have to get a strike force to the Kostromans tonight. Now, go back to your duties."
At this moment Daniel wanted only to get on with the task, but he didn't let his nervous fury cause him to lash out at the petty officer. Woetjans was just as worried at being left in charge of a situation without clear orders as Daniel was at swimming the strait separating the islands. It ought to work out for both of them, but only a fool wouldn't wonder.
"Yessir," Woetjans said. She saluted and vanished into the jungle.
Daniel entered the water. It felt warmer than the night air on his naked skin. He began a leisurely breast stroke toward the distant shore, giving the wrecked yacht a wide berth.
Sundown was less than an hour past, but the night was so black that only by the pinpricks of starlight could Daniel separate the sky from the land and sea. Both Kostroma's tiny moons were up but they were scarcely more than bright planets even when full.
The tide was rising and currents flowed strongly through the reef from the ocean beyond. Daniel drifted farther into the lagoon; he changed his angle, stroking at a slant against the current in order to hold his intended landfall.
In a perfect world Daniel would have been making this swim between tides when the water was still; though now that he thought about it, in a perfect world there wouldn't be any need for him to swim at all. At least he didn't have to do it when the tide was going out and the rip pulled him toward the fanged reef closing the interval between islands.
Daniel still would have tried. The task was necessary, and the likelihood that it would be fatal wouldn't make it optional.
Something bumped him. He lost a stroke in frozen surprise. More things nudged him and slid off with rubbery persistence.
Unblinking eyes humped the water. Forms squirmed past Daniel into the lagoon like a bubble slick. The contacts were mindless, harmless; mere collisions in the night. An enormous shoal of soft-bodied creatures was entering the lagoon with the tide and darkness to feed.
All Daniel could see were the eyes. He couldn't guess the creatures' body shape from their boneless touch, but the largest were at least the length of his forearm.
Daniel continued to stroke, hindered by the creatures' presence. More serious were the jerks and tugs from behind as the shoal snagged the fishline as well. If the line broke, he'd have to do this all over again.
So be it. He'd take the process one stroke at a time, as he always did. At least he'd learned how the sweep had been able to feed itself to such monstrous size.
He swam with his head out of water so that he could see the shore at all times. There was nothing to see, and no likelihood that Daniel would be able to tell in this darkness if Ganser's whole band was waiting to spear him like a fish caught in the shallows.
His thigh muscles were hurting very badly. He felt an incipient cramp as he bunched for another frog kick; instantly he relaxed and lay in a dead man's float while he prayed that he'd been in time.
He had. The big muscles of his right thigh didn't wind themselves into a furious knot as they'd been on the verge of doing, but Daniel didn't dare risk them further tonight.
He swam on, using only arm strokes. His legs dangled behind him like those of a broken-backed dog.
Daniel had overstressed his thighs when he clung to the impeller mount, and he was out of shape. No point in lying to himself: Daniel Leary wasn't as fit as an RCN officer needed to be. If anything happened to the ratings he commanded, it was his fault in all truth as well as by regulation.
Daniel's shoulders weren't in any better condition than his thighs, but the back muscles were less likely to cramp from an inability to dispose of waste products. He was losing strength, though. He needed to reach land soon or he was going to find himself with no option but to float until somebody noticed him at daybreak.
Daniel Leary, floating with the corpse of a sweep the size of a yacht. Well, he hadn't let himself get so fat that there'd be doubt about which was which.
He chuckled, a mistake in that it put off his timing and he breathed water. Maybe a good thing anyway; humor was never out of place in a tight situation.
Besides, he was close to his goal. He could smell the mud, though the toe he dabbed down didn't find bottom. A few feet more—
Something whacked him in the chest. This was a real blow, not the squirming touch of a creature riding the currents. Daniel's head went under water before he could close his mouth.
Fear of someone on shore watching for a disturbance didn't check Daniel's deep lizard-brain fear of drowning. He rose, flailing and spluttering.
He couldn't see anything on the surface. Had he struck a submerged treetrunk? It'd felt solid enough.
Treading water carefully in hope that his thighs wouldn't pack up on him now, Daniel felt in front of him with his outstretched left hand. He didn't touch anything.
He stroked forward again. Something punched him on the left side. As he lurched, he took another underwater blow to the center of his chest.
Daniel knew what the problem was now, and he knew what to do about it. He just wasn't sure that he'd be able to do what was necessary in his present physical condition.
There was a colony of giant tube-worms on his side of the channel, harmless filter-feeders. They rose from their tunnels after dark to sweep the water about them with feathery gills which they withdrew into their bodies every few minutes to ingest the microorganisms trapped in the gills' netlike structure.
The problem was that though the worms lived in colonies, each protected its immediate hunting ground by butting away rivals which tried to tunnel into the mud too close. These worms thought Daniel was one of their own kind, and they didn't intend to let him settle in the territory they'd already claimed.
Daniel turned and paddled feebly parallel to the shore. He'd used a good deal of his strength fighting the tide when it tried to push him in this direction; now when he could use some help he was in quiet water.
He could really use some help. Well, so could his detachment. What Adele and the ratings had was Daniel Leary, and on his honor that would be enough.
Twice he turned toward shore again. Twice the clamped gill covers of an outraged worm prodded him back. He giggled: Kostroman tube worms had a sense of honor very similar to that of Cinnabar nobles. All this time he'd thought society on the two planets was very different.
He supposed the pain in his lungs and shoulders was giving him hallucinations. Well, his present reality had very little to recommend it.
Daniel wasn't fully aware that his fourth attempt to reach shore had succeeded until his left hand dug into mud. He collapsed, still in the water, and dragged sobbing breaths into his lungs. It was nearly a minute before he managed to crawl out of the lagoon and stand upright.
A bush rubbed him; its leaves felt like sandpaper. He ignored them and waved toward the shore he'd left a lifetime ago. Woetjans would be watching through the goggles.
Daniel tested the fishline. It still had the tension of its own full length. Slowly, careful not to snap it now against an unseen snag, Daniel began to hand in the line and the heavier cord that his ratings would by now have fastened to its end.
A bird whose wings were a meter across swooped over the lagoon with a coo-o-o, then vanished again in the overhanging trees. Adele jumped; the Kostromans across the twenty feet of water from her bellowed and sprang away from their campfire. One of them got to his feet and hurled a stone into the night when he was sure that the creature was gone.
The thugs settled again. One of them tried to build up the fire, but the wood he added was damp. The flames sank to a hissing glow and the rest of the gang snarled curses at him. They were very nervous.
They had even better reason to be than they knew.
Adele shivered. The air, though warm in any normal sense, cooled her by evaporation as it dried the salt water from her skin. She'd been too exhausted to eat when she and Daniel returned from scouting, and she hadn't eaten later because tension and the flurry of activity had masked her hunger.
Now she was cold and wet and alone in the darkness. She liked to think of herself as a creature of the mind, but her body was reimposing its own reality.
She'd know better the next time. The thought of there being a next time like this made her grin despite herself: Dangerous Adele, the Pistol-Packing Librarian.
She sobered. There probably would be a next time, if she survived this one.
The Kostromans subsided into glum speculation again. They were urban thugs, as unused to these sorts of conditions as Adele herself was, and they didn't have her self-disciplined willingness to deal with a situation as she found it.
Ganser had pulled into a notch midway along the lagoon side of this islet. He hadn't built a real camp. Open ration cans winked orange in the firelight; one floated near where Adele crouched on the opposite shore.
The inflatable liferaft was drawn up on the mud near the fire. Adele wondered if it was tied. The thugs probably didn't think they'd need the boat again, but the Cinnabar sailors certainly did.
She and the Cinnabar sailors. For the first time since the Mundys of Chatsworth were massacred, Adele Mundy belonged to a group.
Something plopped loudly in the lagoon. A thug cried out and turned. The rhythm of night-sounds shifted for a moment after the cry, then resumed at its previous level.
Daniel Leary stepped out of the undergrowth on the other side of the Kostromans' fire. He carried a wooden baton a meter long.
"Good evening," Daniel said. "Surrender quietly right now. You're surrounded."
The thugs bawled and scrambled away from the fire. One of them aimed a submachine gun at Daniel. Adele was no longer cold. She shot the gunman in the knee. The gunman screamed in rising pain and fell backward.
Ganser swung at Daniel. Daniel jabbed his baton into the thug's soft belly, then rang the wood off Ganser's scalp as he doubled over.
A Kostroman squatting at the edge of the light had a submachine gun also. Adele hadn't noticed it until the thug pulled the trigger. They'd retrieved guns from the lagoon, but unlike the sailors they hadn't even tried to wash the salt out of the circuitry.
The submachine gun blew up in a vivid green flash: its battery had shorted through the mechanism. Vaporized metal and globs of burning plastic casing splattered in all directions like the contents of an incendiary grenade.
Daniel shouted, but the thugs themselves caught most of the fireball. Woetjans and Barnes burst from the undergrowth to either side of their commander and joined him in clubbing every Kostroman still standing.
Adele didn't shoot again. She didn't have a safe target, and the three Cinnabars across the inlet didn't need her help.
The only rope the Cinnabars had that was long enough to span the strait between the islands was Kostroma-made and only a quarter-inch diameter. Daniel was unwilling to stress it with more than one person at a time crossing hand over hand to the other side. If there'd been more time the sailors could have braided a bark hawser; but there wasn't time, for that or much of anything else.
Three Cinnabars had crossed to join Daniel. Adele was the first, because of her pistol and her skill with it. Barnes and Dasi were supposed to follow, but Woetjans had come in Dasi's place.
The fight in the Kostroman camp, such as it was, ended. Daniel swayed, panting as he held his club by both ends. He looked across the notch of water and called, "Don't try to come around, Adele. We'll bring you over in the boat as soon as we've got this lot tied."
The four Cinnabars had worked their way up the shore from the island's tip until they found the Kostroman camp on the other side of this inlet. They hadn't been able to make a plan until they saw the location. Adele had been the one to suggest she stay here where she had a better line of fire than she'd have if she worked around with the others.
She'd felt alone as she waited for Daniel to strike. That wasn't a problem; she'd felt alone for most of her life.
A thug keened in a high-pitched voice that cut through the moans and sick-hearted curses of the others. The one she'd shot, perhaps; or the one who'd incinerated herself by pulling the submachine gun's trigger.
Adele had a good view of the camp from here, but it hadn't been good enough. If the submachine gun had worked, Daniel Leary would be dead. She didn't see any way the group could survive if they lost Daniel.
In rational moments she didn't see how they would survive under Daniel's command either, but it was surprisingly easy in the young lieutenant's presence to suspend disbelief.
Adele looked at the water, then tucked the pistol into the purse she wore on her waistbelt. "I'm coming across," she said. She walked into the inlet.
At midpoint the channel was deep enough that Adele had to splash in an awkward parody of swimming. There was no current; the bottom muck, though unpleasant, slid off her skin like thick oil instead of gripping her. A week ago—a day ago—she'd never have considered plunging into water foul with jungle decay, but her standards of acceptability had slipped.
Daniel gave her a hand out. "You shouldn't have done that," he said. "We can't afford to take unnecessary risks."
"Nor can we afford to waste time," Adele said tartly. That wasn't the real reason she'd walked across, though. She was punishing herself for missing the second gunner until it would have been too late.
Woetjans and Barnes were tying the prisoners with the same cord by which Adele and the two sailors had crossed the strait. The campfire had been trampled in the fighting, but it perversely burned brighter than it had under the Kostromans' leisured direction.
Adele took her pistol out of the purse. Daniel looked down at the prisoners. Several were conscious but they waited stolidly to be tied again. Blood still pulsed from where the club had laid open three inches of Ganser's scalp.
"I suppose I need to put a pressure bandage on that," Daniel muttered; but he didn't seem ready to do so quite yet.
Daniel was still breathing hard. A spatter of flaming plastic had blistered his right forearm; he hadn't dressed it yet.
He reached again into the first aid kit Woetjans had brought over. The horribly burned shooter lapsed into slobbering silence. Daniel put the injector back in its clamp in the kit.
"I already gave her three ampules," he said softly to Adele. "It's a waste of drugs, but it was that or knock her head in. I didn't want to do that, but if she hadn't shut up . . ."
"What about the one I shot?" Adele asked. She didn't know which Kostroman it had been. She'd seen the gun and fired, picking her target by instinct rather than design.
"On the end," Daniel said, nodding to the edge of the firelight. "I gave him a shot too, so he wouldn't go into shock. He'll be all right. He'll live, anyway."
"That's the lot, sir," Woetjans said as she straightened.
"Right," said Daniel. "Woetjans, you take the lifeboat back and gather up the others. It'll take two trips, I think, to bring them and the gear we'll need."
He smiled at his surroundings with what Adele thought was anticipation. "The rest of us'll get to work here, readying things for our friends from the Alliance."
The emergency radio was a flat box that hummed softly. Every ten seconds the output display beside the speaker spiked, indicating that the unit continued to send a homing signal.
"I hear 'em coming," whispered Woetjans. "Hear it? Like thunder a hundred miles off, that's the lift fans."
Daniel spread his hand for silence. The radio's integral microphone wasn't very sensitive, but they didn't need to take chances.
Eleven Cinnabars sat around the fire, wearing Kostroman civilian clothing with an addition of Zojira black and yellow. Woetjans was trying to use the excess in her trousers' waistband to make up what was lacking in inseam length; to say Ganser's clothes were a bad fit for her would be putting it mildly. Other ratings weren't much better off.
It probably didn't matter. The Alliance commandoes weren't coming to stage a fashion show. The blood that stiffened the shoulders and right sleeve of Daniel's shirt wouldn't surprise anybody either.
Barnes and Dasi were across the strait, tending the original camp on the other island. It was a dangerous job, but that description would cover most of what was going on tonight.
The eight other ratings guarded the prisoners. They were all neck deep in the water of an inlet eighty yards from the Kostroman camp. Overhanging foliage ought to block the remainder of the human heat signature, at least from a quick-reaction force that was trying to locate known groupings rather than searching for people who weren't where they were supposed to be.
"Zojira civilians," a voice rasped from the radio. The person speaking was male, but the single-sideband emergency signal and a degree of professional disdain almost concealed even his sex. "Give us a vector from your camp to the bandit position. Over."
The burned Kostroman had died, so Daniel hadn't been required to decide whether to put her in the water with the others. Both her hands had been charred off, and her heat-shriveled intestines writhed where there was no longer a ribcage to cover them.
Her death had been the best option for all concerned. Daniel supposed it was a failing of his as a man as well as an officer that he'd been unwilling to speed the result himself.
Daniel bent over the microphone. The emergency unit's poor sound quality was a blessing under the circumstances: it'd take a better linguist than most commandoes to notice a problem with his accent.
"Master, the pirates're east of us," he said in tones of breathy nervousness. "Maybe a little south, too, a little southeast. They're not half a mile away!"
Daniel could hear the deep bass note of an APC at speed now. The commandoes were coming in fast, despite the risk that the sound of their ducted fans would alert their quarry.
The power it took to lift and propel twenty-odd tons by thrust alone came at the price of a sonic signature, no matter how much you tried to minimize it. Quick and dirty was probably the better choice, as well as the option that would appeal to members of a strike force.
"On my signal," the radio voice said, "fire a flare straight up. I repeat, straight up. And stay off the radio! Out."
Woetjans smiled lazily and stood, holding the flare gun from the Ahura's emergency kit. She was obviously glad to have a task to occupy her while the others could only wait.
Adele sat on an upturned metal bucket. Her attention was seemingly a million miles away. Daniel grinned at her. She raised an eyebrow in question, realized Daniel was just being sociable, and returned to her reverie. Her hands slowly rotated the head-sized object she held between spread fingertips.
Lamsoe and Sun held submachine guns; the Kostromans had salvaged guns, so the Cinnabars taking their place had guns too. Lamsoe held his as if it were a bomb. Daniel wouldn't let him disconnect the battery because the APC's sensors might be able to tell the difference, but the safeties of both weapons were on.
The APC's thrum was louder now. A few minutes earlier the pulsing note could have been concealed in the night sounds except to ears that were searching for it.
"Zojira civilians," the radio ordered, "fire one flare now! Over!"
Woetjans walked two steps closer to the bank of the inlet, aimed the gun skyward, and sent up a flare as close to vertical as you could tell without a plumb line. Daniel hoped the process hadn't been too expert, but the commandoes would probably figure the wogs had just gotten lucky.
"Good, I'm already stiff from sitting here," said Hogg. He still looked like he'd been exhumed on maybe the third day. Daniel'd planned to leave his servant with the prisoners, but at the last instant he'd lacked the courage to say that.
Hogg would've ignored the order anyway. The fellow who'd changed your diapers wasn't going to kiss your boots just because you had "Lieutenant" before your name now.
The flare's tracer burst a hundred feet up in a brilliant blue dazzle. There was enough wind from the sea to push the sparks away from the campfire; not that the commandoes would've cared.
The APC came fast over the trees, heading east toward the first island. The downdraft drove the flare's falling particles into the lagoon as a hundred scattered steam vents. The hiss of quenching sparks was lost in the roar of the fans.
The big vehicle banked left. The plasma cannon in its cupola raked the original Cinnabar camp with a hell of stripped ions.
Steam and fire blew from the jungle. The vegetation was wet, but even stone burned when bathed in radiance as hot as a sun's corona.
A mushroom of soot and vapor erupted from the target area. Daniel heard the chatter of submachine guns as well, a sign of ruthlessness and bad fire discipline. Personal weapons had nothing useful to add to the plasma cannon's swath of destruction.
"Those bastards," Hogg said as he stropped his knife on his palm. "Kill us all while we slept, they would."
He spat, and smiled, and looked much more his old self.
The APC went into a reverse bank and swept back. The cannon fired again, its dense saffron beam ripping apart the pillar of smoke from the first pass. A glowing rock flew out of the impact area, dimming as it tumbled. It landed in the lagoon and exploded from thermal shock.
Daniel was white with cold rage. This was war: if it claimed Barnes and Dasi, well, that was a hazard they understood when they took their oaths. This Alliance commander wasn't alone in his willingness to shoot sleeping enemies without giving them a chance to surrender.
And it wouldn't change anything about what happened next; nothing except that Daniel Leary would take more pleasure in viewing the Alliance casualties he very much expected to see.
Apparently satisfied with what it had achieved on the neighboring island, the APC idled toward what it believed was the Kostroman camp. The muzzle of the plasma cannon pointed toward them as a white-hot oval, cooling slowly.
Daniel stood and raised his hands to shoulder height. A part of his mind was already composing the letters he'd write to the families of Barnes and Dasi, if that were required and if God preserved him to carry out that duty.
Adele watched the armored vehicle come toward her at a slow pace, thunderously loud and bigger than she'd expected even though she'd seen APCs before. She supposed it was because of the circumstances in which she was watching this one that it seemed to loom so large.
The APC was closed up; its driver and gunner used electronic imaging to view their surroundings. Daniel said that vehicles of this sort had sensor suites that could tell if a gnat farted.
The saving grace of the situation was that this jungle had many, many gnats. As in Adele's own proper job, the difficulty was to sort vast quantities of data for the single item you needed. No ordinary weapon was going to pass the electronic frisking, though.
The APC hesitated in the air, then dropped to the surface of the lagoon. Spray erupted in a screen that would have been rainbowed if there'd been any lights to refract within it. The vehicle resumed its leisurely progress, waddling up the inlet toward the camp. It didn't even show the minimal running lights Adele had seen on APCs in Kostroma City during the coup.
The sailors were all standing. They looked nervous, the attitude the commandoes would expect as well as the way Adele supposed they really felt. She didn't want to stand, but at last she got up awkwardly from the bucket so as not to look out of place.
Daniel spoke; sailors moved forward slightly. Adele, though not concealed, was now in the background.
She wasn't afraid. She was too detached to be afraid. She understood precisely what was required of her; if circumstances permitted, she would execute her task. There was very little uncertainty except about the outcome.
The APC's bluff bow slid out of the water, bulldozing a wedge of root-bound mud ahead of it. Spray doused the campfire and drove the sailors back, cursing and covering their eyes.
Adele turned away. She could scarcely be wetter than she was already, but the deliberate insult set her face coldly. Scorn a Mundy of Chatsworth, would they?
She turned again, smiling internally at her own reaction. She'd have laughed, but that would have been out of keeping with her pose as a small-time crook and smuggler. Instead she let her face muscles relax into a neutral expression. She'd never cringed, so she was afraid of an unsatisfactory result if she tried to fake it now.
The APC swung broadside to the eleven Cinnabars. Its stern shoved aside undergrowth and nestled there. The cupola rotated so that the plasma cannon stayed trained on the presumed Kostromans. Five submachine guns projected from miniature gunports in the armored side.
Realistically, the weapons weren't much danger because those threatened were close enough to the vehicle to duck under the cannon and flatten themselves against the APC's flank between the gunports. The muzzles would have a psychological effect, though, especially on the stupid thugs the commandoes thought they were facing.
The driver shut his fans down. The roar of air through the eight intake ducts stilled, but a high-pitched whine indicated various parts continued to spin in readiness for any need.
The plasma cannon twitched, aiming at Lamsoe's head. "You two with guns!" the Alliance voice shouted, this time through a conformal speaker somewhere on the vehicle's hull. "Throw them in the water now! And the six of you who have knives, you too! Now! We can see you!"
Daniel stood a half step in front of his sailors, waggling his raised hands and smirking in apparent terror. At the command he clawed into his pocket and came out with the little knife he'd used to peel nuts.
Lamsoe and Sun spun their submachine guns toward the inlet. Sun's splattered mud on the bank, but Lamsoe got rid of his with the enthusiasm owed a live grenade. It took longer for sailors to fumble folding knives out of their pockets, but they flew toward the water too.
Though Hogg threw his knife, Adele heard it thunk into a tree bole in the near distance. If the Alliance officer noticed the slight disobedience, he passed over it for now.
A hatch opened in the vehicle's side, just back of the cupola. The man who got out was barely taller than Adele but strongly built. He held the central grip of a submachine gun, a weapon both more compact and more deadly than the Kostroman equivalents the sailors had just thrown away.
"Now listen up!" the officer said. He spoke in an upper-class Pleasaunce accent.
The officer waved the submachine gun as though it were a conductor's baton. The hatch behind him was a pale rectangle; the vehicle's interior lights were faint, but they were brighter than the jungle now that the fire was dead.
"You wogs will go back under restraint," he continued, "or you'll stay here till you rot. And you can count yourselves lucky that my colonel has a softer heart than I do, or there'd be another burned patch of jungle and we'd be heading home without the trouble of tying you, do you understand?"
"But master—" Daniel whined. He sounded so much like a crying child that Adele felt her jaw clench.
The officer thrust his gun an inch from Daniel's face. "Shut up or I'll do it my way!" he said.
Daniel whimpered and bent away. Adele tossed her ripe soap-bubble fungus through the open hatch. The officer's eyes flicked sideways at the movement and Daniel caught his gun-wrist in his left hand.
Sailors dived for cover as they'd been warned to do. Screaming chaos broke out within the APC. A submachine gun raked the night.
Adele ignored the shots—they weren't aimed at her or, most likely, aimed at anything at all. She bent to tip over the bucket she'd used as a seat. Her pistol was beneath, concealed from sensors by the galvanized iron bucket.
She straightened with the gun in her hand. There wasn't anything she needed to shoot.
The plasma cannon pointed at a crazy angle as the howling gunner tried to free himself from his harness. A commando emptied a submachine gun through a port on the opposite side of the APC; pellets lit the jungle like a stream of fireflies, clipping foliage and sending up puffs of splintered wood. Other troops hammered the sides of their vehicle, but even a crash-bar hatch release required a little more coordination than these retained in their present puling agony.
Daniel held the Alliance officer between him and the APC. He had both his wrists, now. The Alliance officer twisted with a grace suggesting he was expert in unarmed combat, but the Cinnabar lieutenant was stronger and very angry.
"The men you squirted over on the other island, master?" Daniel said in a hard, precise voice.
The Alliance officer tried to bite him; Daniel had the leverage and kept the teeth away from his shoulder as his hand continued to grind together the bones of the officer's gun-wrist. "They were really warm stones wrapped in blankets to give the right heat signatures. I had two of my ratings tending the fire there, though, and I hope—"
The commando's wrist failed with a sound like that of stones rubbing. His eyes rolled up and he fainted in Daniel's arms.
"I really hope they heard you coming in time to cover up in their dugouts," Daniel concluded, his voice softer. He straightened—he'd spread his legs to brace himself during the struggle—and surveyed the situation, still using the Alliance officer's body as a shield.
"It seems to have worked," Adele said. She stood with her pistol at her left side. Two submachine guns still protruded from gunports, but their muzzles were tilted up. Their owners had dropped the weapons as they tried to fight off an enemy more insidious than poison gas.
A gun fired inside the vehicle. Sparks, pellets or metal spalled from the inner face of the armor, spun through the hatch.
A commando finally managed to release the latch that dropped the whole side of the troop compartment. Soldiers tumbled out, twisting and moaning. One commando shambled blindly into the undergrowth, clawing the air with her hands. The sailors let her go.
The soap bubble fungus had ruptured into fluffy tendrils on the compartment's deck. A single insect the size of Adele's thumb glittered in the lights, then settled on the neck of a commando.
Daniel took the submachine gun from the officer he held, then laid him on the ground and stepped back. There'd been sixteen troops aboard the APC. None of them were upright now. Some thrashed, but Adele could see at least half a dozen others were as still as death.
"I think we'd better get back a little farther," Daniel said in a voice wheezy with recent exertion. "They're not supposed to fly farther than a couple meters from the nest, but I don't want to be the one to prove that was as wrong as the data on how big sweeps get."
Adele put her pistol in her pocket. Together they walked slowly toward the sailors now appearing from the jungle. Hogg joined them.
"The beetles aren't supposed to live longer than ten minutes from when they leave the fungus, either," Daniel added. "But we're going to stay on the safe side there, too."
Behind them, tough Alliance soldiers moaned in mindless pain.
"Couldn't we come by boat?" Adele complained. She was acting for the benefit of the prisoner the two sailors were dragging through the jungle behind her and Daniel, but the peevish tone wasn't entirely put on. Feet had worn the trail to a narrow creek with muddy banks.
"Our Alliance friend might try to escape," Daniel explained. His voice was breathy with exertion. "Or drown himself, anyway, especially if he figures out what's waiting for him. Besides, it was your idea to get the information this way."
It actually had been Adele's idea, offered diffidently when Daniel wondered aloud how best to interrogate the prisoners about the Aglaia and her crew. Daniel and Hogg were enthusiastically sure that the plan would work, at least after they'd refined it. Adele found that hard to imagine; but her knowledge of what went on in other people's minds was not, she knew, to be trusted.
"I don't know anything," the commando said muzzily. "And if I did, I wouldn't tell you fuckers."
The Alliance prisoners had been stripped—Daniel wanted their uniforms, but Adele knew the psychological effect would be useful as well—tied, and held separately in nooks in the jungle. Any of them who tried to speak had been gagged as well. The interrogation had to wait till daybreak.
Their prisoner was a sergeant whose skin was startlingly white beneath a mat of black chest hair. His wrists were tied in front of him and a pole was thrust between his elbows and his back. Barnes and Dasi held opposite ends of the pole, forcing the sergeant to walk sideways, crab fashion, along the trail.
"Well, I hope you're wrong," Adele said in her usual coolly astringent tone. "The two soldiers we tried this on first didn't talk, and I'm getting tired of tramping through the mud."
"I got nothing to say," the prisoner repeated. His foot caught in a trailing vine, tripping him so that his weight fell on the pole. He gasped at a pain so severe that he staggered again.
Barnes and Dasi paused; they'd have to carry him if he blacked out completely. "Daniel," Adele murmured, halting the lieutenant. Sailors had improved the trail from the first time she and Daniel scouted it, but whoever was in the lead still had to force fresh growth aside.
A fungus beetle had bitten the prisoner on the right shoulder. His arm and the whole side of his chest were still lividly swollen. Pus oozing from the wound trailed a yellow crust as far as his elbow.
"Well, I tell you, Sarge," Dasi said with bantering menace, "I'd just as soon you didn't talk. I'd just as soon none of you talked. I was back at the other camp, you see, when you bastards had your fun shooting it up. I got blisters on my butt from that, and I guess I was still luckier than you planned me to be."
Barnes leaned over and pinched the sergeant's cheek. "You be just as tough as you want, boy," he said. "I really like to hear you fellows scream."
The prisoner didn't speak. He had his feet under him again. Dasi twitched the pole.
The party plodded the short remaining distance to the inlet where soap bubble fungus grew. Daniel and Adele stood to the side so that the sailors could bring the prisoner up to where he had a good view.
"Now, Sergeant," Daniel said with slightly patronizing formality, "this is the situation. We're going to tie you to one of those trees there—"
He gestured to the grove twenty feet away. Two naked commandoes were there already, seated on the ground with their hands tied around the trunks of the trees behind them.
They were dead and their bodies were swollen horribly. A red, two-inch beetle sat motionless on the protruding tongue of one of the corpses. Above each body were the tattered remains of a soap bubble fungus, its core everted from the yellow rind like trails of cotton batting.
"The fungus is quite tasty," Daniel said. He smiled. "Not that you'll have time to appreciate it, I'm afraid. As I said, we're going to tie you near your friends and walk a good distance away before we start asking you questions. If you answer all the questions completely, then we'll untie you and take you back to camp. But it has to be a 'full and frank disclosure,' as they say."
"You can't do this," the sergeant whispered hoarsely.
"That's a remarkably silly thing to say," Adele commented. "Given that you can see we already have done it."
"He's woozy from the sting he got last night," Daniel said soothingly. "Poor man, I've heard that a bite from a fungus beetle hurts worse than being stuffed into a hot furnace."
He smiled at the prisoner. "But you see," he went on, "that's just one bite. If you're sitting under a nest when my friend here blows it open—"
Adele raised the pistol high enough from her pocket for the prisoner to see it, then let the weapon slide back.
"—you'll be bitten many times. And I'm afraid that's invariably fatal."
Daniel walked toward the grove. He moved as though he were stepping on eggs.
"Be careful, for God's sake," Adele snapped. The concern in her voice was real enough. She knew that Daniel didn't take risks he thought were excessive, but she wasn't willing to trust his judgment of "excessive."
With thumb and forefinger, Daniel picked the beetle off the corpse's tongue. He strode back to the others, moving much more quickly.
He offered the insect to the prisoner. Adele looked closely as well; she hadn't seen the creatures by good light before. The bright red wing cases were edged with cream. It was quite attractive in its way.
"They only live a few minutes after they come out of the nest," Daniel said in a friendly, informational tone. "Striking colors, don't you think? These aren't fangs, exactly, they're really modified antennae, but they certainly carry poison the way fangs do. I guess you know that better than me."
Daniel grinned. He wiggled the insect in the direction of the prisoner's swollen shoulder. The prisoner screamed and tried to twist away. Barnes cuffed him back; he screamed again and slumped.
Daniel tossed the insect into the lagoon. "Tie him to the tree between those other two," he ordered. He spit at the floating bug and spun it over in a swirl of bubbles. "And don't bump the fungus yourself, all right?"
"What do you want to know?" mumbled the sergeant. "I swear to God, I'm just a soldier, but I'll tell you what I know."
"Let him sit," Daniel said to Barnes, "but keep hold of the pole."
He looked at the prisoner and said, "Where's the crew of the Aglaia being held? The Cinnabar naval vessel that was in harbor when you landed, the Aglaia."
The prisoner's eyes were closed. "All those guys are locked up in the ship," he said through thick lips. "Not the officers, though. I think they're in the palace but I don't know, I never had that duty myself. They'll be taken off-planet as soon as the rest of the squadron lands, I heard."
Adele withdrew her data unit and seated herself cross-legged in the mud. She got out the wands and began to enter the sergeant's information.
"When do you expect the rest of the squadron?" Daniel was asking.
Kostroman birds and insects buzzed warmly in the grove, devouring the luscious fungus which Adele had shot open earlier in the morning. For the most part, the local creatures ignored the human corpses.
The Alliance soldiers were among the six who had been killed by multiple bites inside the APC, unable to escape when Adele flung the nest through the hatchway the night before.
Gambier and Barnes had endorsements on their paybooks indicating the RCN thought they could fly ducted-fan vehicles. Half a dozen other ratings had experience as well, either in civilian life or less officially in the service. Daniel didn't have to worry about who could fly the armored personnel carrier.
There was plenty else to worry about, of course, but right at the moment Daniel Leary was feeling pretty good. Pretty damned good.
The APC revved, then lifted. Gambier was at the controls. The sides were folded down as if for a quick insertion, so the ratings in the troop compartment were clearly visible. They and their fellows on the ground cheered as the big vehicle slid along the inlet. It rose slowly until the downdraft no longer exploded the water away to either side.
"Isn't it dangerous to have passengers aboard when you're testing the equipment?" Adele asked as she watched the APC at his side.
Daniel shrugged. "There might have been a problem getting off the ground," he said, "though it's all pretty automated."
Adele turned her head to look at him. "I suppose if you'd thought it was really dangerous," she said, "you'd have been aboard yourself."
Daniel grinned. "I didn't think it was dangerous," he said, avoiding the direct answer that would have made him sound like he was trying to be a hero. The ratings expected an officer to share their dangers; to avoid doing so would be unprofessional.
Likewise, it would be unprofessional for an officer to involve himself in the common dirtiness of naval life, washing dishes or scrubbing grease from hydraulic control systems. That was where the extreme democrats went wrong. Though . . .
He'd now gotten to know the surviving representative of the Mundys of Chatsworth, the family who according to Corder Leary were the life and breath of radical democracy on Cinnabar. Adele wasn't what Daniel would call a radical democrat.
Perhaps there'd been some misrepresentation on both sides of the question. That was pretty generally true in politics, he supposed.
Daniel glanced higher into the wedge of sky visible past the overhanging trees. "Someday I'd like you to help me with the constellations from here," he said. "The Kostromans do name their constellations, don't they? I guess I was just assuming they do."
"What?" said Adele. "I have no idea, but I'll find out."
She sat on the ground and brought up her little computer. Daniel hadn't meant Adele to dig into the problem immediately. "Someday" meant to him "when things have settled down."
Realistically, things weren't going to settle down while he was on Kostroma. Though for his own sense of well-being he had to pretend this was an aberration in the life of a naval officer, that the normal routine would soon return.
Daniel squatted beside Adele, his arms wrapped around his knees and his buttocks slightly above the ground. Not that he could get much muddier . . .
"The trick would have worked just as well if we'd done it in all truth," he said. "Tying live prisoners under a fungus bubble and letting the beetles kill the first one or two if they didn't talk."
The note of the APC's fans changed from a pulse to a whisper; the ratings had landed on the other island to retrieve items salvaged from the wreck. The APC had more carrying capacity than the little liferaft, and using it provided hands-on experience in a leisured environment.
"Perhaps," said Adele, "but we'll never know."
She put her wands down and looked over at Daniel. "People like us will never know. But our way worked."
A hand-sized crustacean scuttled from the muddy bank, extended a pair of tentacles to seize a ration can the Kostromans had flung down, and ran back the way it had come. Each segment of the creature's jointed back had a stalked eye at the midline. They twisted like flowers in a rainstorm to watch the humans.
The crustacean vanished into the water with its prize; the can gave a plop! as water filled it. The little creature was probably after a home rather than food, but Daniel didn't know enough about the local biota to be sure.
"There are constellations, yes," Adele said. "They seem to be named for geographical features of Topaz, where the colony originated. Would you like to see the display?"
She offered the data unit. Daniel shook his head, smiling his thanks. "Not right now," he said.
He pointed to the trail the crustacean's many feet had wriggled into the mud. "I was going to put the prisoners on a detail policing up the mess they'd made," he went on. "The local animals seem to be pleased with the chance to take care of it themselves. Besides, it's probably best to keep both lots hogtied until we're ready to leave. I don't want another slip-up."
The prisoners, Ganser's thugs and the surviving Alliance commandoes, lay like so many duffelbags at intervals along the opposite bank of the inlet. They were bound and anchored by the neck to rooted saplings. Two guards were with them, but the prisoners were visible to the Cinnabars on this side of the water also for additional safety.
They were gagged. A prisoner who moved more than a guard thought necessary was kicked, but that was a matter of casually brutal control rather than torture.
"You know," said Daniel, "if we'd dumped the gang off the end of the dock on Kostroma, we wouldn't have the APC and Alliance uniforms now. Funny how things work out, isn't it?"
Adele sniffed. "That had nothing to do with the decision," she said. "It shouldn't have anything to do with any similar decision either. Or are you suggesting that the Lord is with us because our hearts are pure?"
Daniel laughed loudly and got to his feet. "Your heart may be pure," he said, "but for my own part I've just been too busy. One of Ganser's little friends doesn't look half bad in the right light."
Adele rose beside him. He looked at her and, now that he'd defused her suggestion with a joke, said, "Adele, I don't think God will preserve Cinnabar. That's what the Republic has a navy for, after all. But I do think that the people with least on their consciences sleep better than others do. I like my sleep."
He thought about the little blonde with a snake's tail tattooed from her neck to reappear on her bare midriff, heading lower. In a return to his cheery tone, Daniel added, "And if God wants to throw us a bonus, that's all right with me."
Adele sat with her head out of the cupola as Barnes brought the overloaded APC down where the Cinnabar camp had been. Streams of plasma had considerably enlarged the clearing, but all signs of the shelters and goods salvaged from the yacht were gone.
Water sprayed as the vehicle settled. After the ions had burned long tracks of soil away, rain and seepage through the porous rock had filled the ruin.
Adele wondered if Daniel was dropping the Alliance soldiers here rather than on the beach to make a point. Daniel Leary was an extremely straightforward man, but she'd realized early after meeting him that he was quite subtle in his direct fashion—when he chose to be.
It was hard to remember that she'd met Daniel only a week before.
Barnes adjusted the drive fans to a whining idle. Without orders, Hogg and several of the sailors crammed into the troop compartment rolled the prisoners onto the ground. The Alliance troops were bound individually and roped to one another by their wrists as well.
Adele lifted herself up to sit on the folded-back cupola hatch. By leaning forward, she could see the Alliance troops as they writhed and splashed, cursing.
Daniel stood on the vehicle's side panel folded down into a ramp. He lifted a prisoner's face from the trench in which she spluttered and supported her until she squirmed into a position that was survivable if not necessarily comfortable.
"Shut the motors off for a moment, Barnes," Daniel said. "I want them to be able to hear what I have to say."
Sixteen of the Cinnabars, Adele included, wore commando uniforms including the communication helmets. She heard Daniel's voice clearly over the helmet intercom as well as a faint echo through the air.
The helmets were fine for now, but they'd have to switch off the radios well before reaching Kostroma City. Even if the Alliance forces were too busy to institute a comprehensive signals watch, chatter in Cinnabar accents over Alliance equipment would raise a red flag.
The rhythmic hum of the engines sank to a quiver. A squad of sailors dragged the prisoners, still linked, a few yards farther so they couldn't grab a landing skid as the APC lifted.
Daniel stepped to the ground and faced the naked prisoners. "There's enough food and water on this atoll to keep you forever," he said. "Also we're leaving most of the rations we brought from the naval stores, here and on the other island. If you don't like the division of supplies I've made between you and Ganser, you can go across and discuss the matter. Or you can join forces, of course."
He smiled at the Alliance lieutenant without humor. Adele knew Daniel well enough by now to recognize that he was angry; surprisingly angry, she thought, until she remembered what the plasma-ripped campsite meant to him.
"The last time I did something like this," Daniel went on, "I told the people I was marooning that I'd send them help in thirty days if they hadn't managed to get off the atoll themselves. I'm not saying that now. All you're getting from me is your lives . . . which is rather better than you were offering, isn't it?"
He stepped up into the troop compartment. "You can't leave us tied!" a soldier said. The one who spoke was the sergeant who'd first told what he knew about the Aglaia. "We can't survive unless you cut us loose!"
Daniel grimaced. "Hogg, throw him a knife," he said. "Barnes, take us up to a hundred feet and circle the area."
Hogg smashed a brandy bottle on the side of the hatchway. As the motors began to grunt under load, he tossed the jagged neck in the direction of the sergeant.
The sides of the troop compartment were hinged horizontally. They lifted halfway to form railings on either side while the compartment remained open to light and air. Adele slid back into the cupola seat as the vehicle rose.
Daniel touched her shoulder. "I'll trade places, if you don't mind," he said.
Embarrassed to have usurped his position—he was commander, of course; what had she been thinking of?—Adele squirmed out of the cupola and into the rear compartment. Sailors made way for her with quiet deference. She looked over the side.
At the specified altitude, the APC slowly circled the two islands and the reef joining them. An occasional pop in the helmet's integral headphones told Adele that Daniel was talking to one or more of the sailors on a separate channel. She could listen in if she wanted, but there wasn't any reason to do so.
The Ahura's lifeboat floated in the lagoon, turning slowly in the still water. A slick of pollen and bits of foliage drifted behind the boat. The Alliance soldiers were barely visible past the treetops as they squirmed to free themselves, while on the other island some of the Kostromans were already standing upright.
"Starboard watch," Woetjans ordered over the intercom. "Aim at the liferaft."
Sailors jostled one another in cheerful surprise, thrusting submachine guns captured from the commandoes over the railing. Adele remained at the rail but she didn't bother to draw her pistol. Sailors on the other side of the compartment complained good-naturedly.
"Open fire!"
Water exploded in a spray that completely hid the little boat. The air filled with ozone and ionized aluminum even though the troop compartment was half-open. The crackling gun mechanisms echoed like logs splitting.
"Cease fire!"
The raft was a tatter of flexible red plastic in the center of foam which spread a hundred feet in all directions. The sailors weren't marksmen—some must be amazingly bad shots, judging from where their rounds hit—and the light pellets weren't intended for work at this range. Nonetheless the target had been completely destroyed.
The APC pulled through a figure-eight that reversed its direction. "Port watch," Woetjans ordered, "aim at the yacht."
There were loud cheers. Most of the remaining sailors had already bent over their railing, hunched and squinting in a variety of distorted notions about how to shoot accurately. One of them—inevitably—jerked his trigger an instant before Woetjans said, "Fire!"
The upturned stern didn't vanish, but it began to crumble like a sand castle in the rain. Again Adele saw water spout thirty yards from the intended target, but a submachine gun with a 300-round magazine didn't require a crack shot to be effective.
"Cease fire!" Woetjans ordered. "Cease fire, Dasi, or I'll take the fucking thing away and feed it to you!"
There was a moment's silence. The plasma cannon roared. What was left of the Ahura erupted into an iridescent mushroom cloud. The APC rocked with recoil from the one-second jet of ions, each of infinitesimal mass but accelerated to the speed of light.
Adele heard the cupola hum as it rotated. Nevertheless the second spurt of plasma startled her. Steam and shimmering fire enveloped the remains of the lifeboat.
The lagoon danced briefly with fairy light as ions recombined to their normal atomic state. That passed, but vari-hued fish, scalded by the manmade hellfire, floated to the surface.
Daniel stepped out of the cupola. "Barnes," he ordered on a general channel, "follow the programmed course and speed to Kostroma City. Gambier will spell you two hours out."
He grinned at Adele and said—not using the intercom, "Communications Officer Mundy, take over and make sure we're not getting into something we don't expect. What we do expect is bad enough, right?"
Adele shrugged. "So far," she said, "it appears that it's better to be on our side than against us."
She settled herself on the cupola seat. The vehicle's extensive sensor and communications suites were arrayed in a ring attached to the hull below the cannon in the dome. Adele logged onto the Alliance military net, using the codes of a cutter hanging out of service aboard a destroyer in the Floating Harbor. As soon as she had access, she searched for any sign that the Aglaia's officers had been moved from cells in the basement of the Elector's Palace where she'd located them the night before.
She smiled as she worked, her touch certain despite the unfamiliar system. Communications Officer Mundy.
Adele Mundy. One of us.