The hovercraft shuddered as the eel's sinuous body brushed the skirts from the inside. The creature was agitated with the thought of prey.
Caffey looked at the motorman in surprise. "Hey, it's no sweat, Leafie," he said soothingly. "Concussion'll kill the moray, but the water down there'll stop the shrapnel before it gets to the skirts."
The torpedoman's toe tapped the deck. "Or us. It's no sweat."
"Naw," said Leaf. He'd forgotten that the others hadn't seen what
he
saw when the port was open. "That's not what I mean. The torpedoes are still on their hooks down there. If the grenade sets one of them off—"
Memory strangled his voice.
Leaf didn't have to finish. Caffey knew what a torpedo could do, even to a vessel a thousand times the size of this little hovercraft.
But that's impossible!" the CO blurted.
Leaf looked at him. Ensign Brainard's face was suddenly gray. "This is K44, and they torpedoed the
Wiesel
to save our lives!"
Technician 2nd Class Leaf filled his glass from the pitcher and said, "'Bout time you fetch us some more beer, kid," to K67's assistant motorman.
Bozman looked doubtfully at the pitcher, then over his shoulder toward the long, crowded bar of the Dirtside Saloon. "There's plenty left," he said, raising his voice slightly more than the saloon's ambient noise required. "And anyway, I got the last one."
Caffey filled his own glass, then poured the remainder of the pitcher into Bozman's half-full tumbler. He banged the empty pitcher back on the table among its four brethren.
Caffey grinned at Leaf's striker. "You were saying, kid?"
"I was saying," growled Bozman, "that I got the last
two
."
Leaf belched. "That's the price newbies pay for being allowed to sit with vets like me and Fish," he said. "Pay gladly, if they're smart."
The motorman's voice was mellow—for Leaf. The beer had given him enough of a buzz to dull memories the afternoon's Board of Review had churned up. He basked in the glow of being alive.
The Herd, like all the Free Companies, granted its personnel liberal leave to browse the rich entertainments of the keeps. Despite that, men on base duty needed after-hours relaxation; base facilities gave credit against pay; and a certain percentage of mercenaries found they simply didn't like the company of civilians.
The Dirtside Saloon was one of scores of bars within Hafner Base's fortified perimeter. It was full of men, and so were all its sister clubs and saloons.
"Got through another, didn't we, Leafie?" Caffey said in a reflective tone. "Been a few of those."
The Dirtside was lighted by bands of muted green which drifted slowly across the ceiling. The illumination was adequate for the duty squad of Shore Police who kept watch through their image-intensification visors, but Leaf found it hard to be sure of the torpedoman's expression.
"There was a few of them back on Block Eighty-One," Leaf rasped. "Fuck it. Any one you walk away from."
"You two knew each other when you were growing up, didn't you?" Bozman said over the rim of his glass. He was careful not to look at either of the chiefs as he spoke.
"In a manner of speaking, kid," Caffey said.
Leaf laughed without humor. The lights in his mind brightened to billowing red flames for a moment before sinking back into the bar's cool green. "We wasn't friends, if that's what you mean."
"Hell, Leafie," the torpedoman said. "We didn't kill each other. That counts for something on Block Eighty-One." The liquid in Caffey's glass trembled as his fist tightened. His eyes were unfocused. "D'ye ever go back, Leafie?" he asked. All the joking, all the easy fellowship, had been flayed from his voice.
Leaf gulped his beer. "Hell, no," he said. "
Hell
, no."
Caffey looked at the assistant motorman. "Kid," he ordered, "get us another pitcher."
Bozman bobbed his head and scraped his chair back from the table. The noncoms stared at his back as he fought through the press to the bar, but their minds were on other things.
"You're smart," Caffey said. "I went back the once. Half the guys we knew was dead, and the rest of them was in jail. On on the netters for life, if that counts as life. It's a jungle back there, Leafie. It's worse 'n what's out beyond the perimeter."
The automatic cannon which guarded the electrified frontier of Hafner Base crashed a regular accompaniment to Herd life. It was only by concentrating that the mercenaries noticed them. Leaf's experienced ears could differentiate muzzle blasts from the slightly-sharper counterpoint of shells bursting at the jungle rim. Occasionally, a heavier gun would join in to deal with a particular threat.
"God," Leaf muttered.
Bozman was back with a pticher so full that it sloshed when he set it on the table. The motorman blinked. Caffey looked surprised too. It hadn't seemed there'd been enough time. . . .
"Look," said Bozman as he sat down again, "I got a question. Not—"
Both noncoms jerked their heads around like gun turrets, ready to fire.
"—about any of that," the assistant motorman blurted quickly. "About the Board of Review this afternoon." He forced a smile.
Neither of the chiefs smiled back. "Go ahead," Leaf said.
Bozman licked his lips. "Look," he said. "It's about you guys testifying that K44 sheered off when the shooting started. I didn't say nothing to the Board—"
"Not as dumb as he looks," Caffey said to Leaf. His voice was as playful as a cat killing.
"I didn't say nothing," Bozman continued, staring determinedly at the table, "but I
saw
K44 running in ahead of us all the way."
He swallowed and looked up again, attempting another smile. "I mean, y'know, I thought I did."
Caffey started to laugh. Bozman's expression became so gogglingly silly that the motorman laughed the harder. Leaf leaned over to slap his striker on the back.
"Oh, kid," the motorman chortled. "I forget what a goddam newbie you are!"
Bozman looked as stiff and angry as a whore with a broom stuffed up her backside. "But I
saw
—" he said.
"Our shadow," Leaf interrupted. "You saw our shadow. When the starshells dropped, they threw shadows over the waves ahead of us."
The assistant torpedoman opened his mouth in amazement.
"Don't feel bad," Leaf added. "It happens a lot."
Caffey belched and poured himself another beer. "It happens a lot to
newbies
," he said.
Both noncoms were relaxed and buoyant again. The motorman slid his own glass over to be filled.
"You didn't know Ted Holman, kid," he said, "so I'll tell you: he didn't have any balls. His brother kept pushin' him t'be a hero, but Teddy just wasn't cut out fer that. There's less chance he ran K44 in ahead of us than there is this glass is gonna turn t' gold in my hand."
He raised it, then drank. "Nope, still beer."
Caffey laughed. "I'll tell you something else, kid," he said. "I don't believe K44 circled around and came back, neither."
"But they had to come back," Bozman exclaimed. "They torpedoed the
Wiesel
. I
know
that happened!"
"
We
did for the
Wiesel
," Caffey said.
He raised his left hand to silence Bozman's certain protest. "I know, the console was shot away for our fish lost guidance—but that don't mean they stopped and rolled belly up. Tonello aimed the boat for a hand's-off run, and the
Wiesel
wasn't doing any maneuvering the way she was caught in the channel like that."
"Ted Holman's welcome to be a dead hero," the motorman said between swallows, "seeings as he's dead. But I figure K44 took a shell up the ass as she ran."
"You can't outrun a bullet, after all," Caffey agreed philosophically.
"I tell you," said Leaf, watching the patterns his blunt fingertip drew in the condensate on his glass. "I'd sooner have a skipper with the guts to still do the job when the shit hits the fan. It's safer. And sooner or later in this business, the shit always hits the fan."
"Hell, in life," the torpedoman muttered.
"Lieutenant Tonello was a goddam good skipper that way," Leaf said. He slid his empty glass to Caffey.
"And you know?" he continued. "I think this new kid Brainard may be even better."
K44 rested in a tidal pool, though the bar a quarter mile to the north was submerged at this stage of solar attraction. Brainard stared over the portside rail. The water was so clear between waves that when he spit, his subconscious expected to see the gobbet dimple the sandy bottom. Instead, there was a splash.
A dozen tiny fish, scarcely more than teeth with fins, converged on the spot. They continued to froth the surface for minutes after they must have been certain there was no prey to justify a battle.
Other iridescent fish prowled among the fragments of crab armor which littered the bottom in a wide fan to seaward. Occasionally a fish found a further scrap of meat to worry from the chitin. Others flashed in to attack their lucky fellow while his jaws were engaged with the scavenged tidbit.
Officer-Trainee Wilding stumped around the cockpit to join Brainard. The enlisted crewmen waited for orders with evident concern.
Brainard knew they were worried. He knew that he
had
to decide what to do . . . but his whole universe had overturned when he learned that the commander of K44 hadn't saved his life. Maybe Fate had done so, maybe there was a friendly God; and maybe the whole universe was a game of chance in which men were chips, not players.
Wilding leaned against the rail and took a deep breath. His face looked pale; cold sweat flecked his skin. He wedged the rifle into the corner where his body met the railing, then gestured at the bottom with his right index finger.
The officer-trainee was doing better since he got a solid plastic deck underneath him. Not physically better. Physically, he looked worse than the rest of them, and they all looked like yesterday's corpses.
The fever had stopped twisting Wilding's mind. Even when he dragged his thoughts through delirious pathways, he still managed to save all their lives, though. . . .
"At least having the moray here limits our problem to one," he said. "Otherwise there'd be hundreds of crabs trying to get at us. That'd be a lot worse."
"Rifle bullets aren't going to kill an eel that big," Brainard said. He turned around and nodded to the men. "Leaf's right, though. I won't chance using the grenade with two torpedoes down in the plenum chamber."
Those were the first words he'd spoken since he learned about the torpedoes. The relief on the faces of his crew was palpable.
"Maybe we could patch the holes from outside the skirts?" Wheelwright offered.
"Don't be a bigger fool 'n God made you, kid," the motorman snapped without real malice. "It's pressure that holds the patching film in place. Stick it on from the outside, and it'll just blow free when we fire up the fans."
"That wouldn't help anyway," said Wilding gently. "The eel lairs in the plenum chamber, but it hunts outside."
The officer-trainee leaned cautiously over the railing and pointed forward along the hovercraft's side. There was a flared tunnel in the sand where the skirts began to curve in toward the bow. Fragments of crab shell were particularly concentrated near that end of the vessel.
From the size of the opening, the moray was three feet in diameter. That was even bigger than Brainard had thought. A grenade could still do the job.
They couldn't just wait until fresh prey drew the eel away from the torpedoes, though. . . .
"Leaf," the ensign said. "I've seen the damage-control menu, I know what it says. But will K44 really float if we just patch her plenum chamber?"
The motorman frowned as he met Brainard's gaze. "Well, sir," he said, "the one fan's fucked, that's a dockyard job to replace. But three fans 're plenty if you don't need top speed—and if your skirts ain't shot to shit, so they won't hold pressure."
He shrugged. "The read-out says there's nothing so big we can't patch it. Eyeballing the skirts from up here on deck, it looks the same. Lotta little holes, one maybe from a six-inch—but just the hole, it didn't go off. Maybe we get down inside the chamber, there'll be a problem after all. But I don't see bloody why there oughta be."
Caffey, back in the cockpit studying the holographic display Brainard had called up, nodded. "Get rid of the eel, run patching film around the plenum chamber—and we're golden. We can sail the sucker home."
"Then why," said Brainard, "didn't K44's crew do that? They must've known that with their ascender gear shot off, nobody was going to pick up their distress calls more than a few miles away."
His eyes glazed with the vision of spike-thorned honeysuckle, toppling toward him to drain his blood. "Why did they stay here to d-d-die?"
Nobody spoke for a moment. Officer-Trainee Wilding put his hand on Brainard's arm.
"Sir," Wilding said, "I don't think you can understand, because you've never been afraid. But they were just normal men, Holman and his crew. Maybe there wasn't an eel in the plenum chamber, not at first. But something was—crabs, bloodworms. Or it might have been."
"Down there, it gets darker 'n a yard up a hog's ass," Leaf said soberly. "And nobody was gonna risk his life because a chickenshit like Ted Holman told him t' do it."
"Don't tell me about being afraid," Brainard whispered.
A column of spike-thorned honeysuckle toppling forward to drink. . . .
"Right," he said. "We need to bait the eel into the open."
He put his rifle on the deck and bent to unfasten his boots. Boots and trousers would drag in the water, slowing him down.
"Caffey and Wheelwright, you'll hold my left wrist and haul me back aboard when Mr Wilding gives the order," Brainard went on. "Leaf and Newton, you're on my right. Mr Wilding, you'll be in charge of the operation—"