Seas of Fortune(98)

Others seeds came to rest on land, and insects and rodents hurried to the feast. As did Maria. She walked, then ran, basket in hand, toward the base of the tree, where there were many seeds. There, an agouti was already greedily stuffing seeds down its gullet, as fast as it could. Maria’s seeds, damn it!

“Wait!” ordered Henrique, grasping Maria’s shoulder.

An instant later, the predator that Henrique had spotted, a jararaca do norte, struck. The agouti shuddered in the six-foot-long pit viper’s fangs. It didn’t suffer long; the snake, what an up-time biologist would call Bothrops atrox, a kind of fer-de-lance, could deliver a large dose of a quite potent venom. Enough to kill an agouti quickly . . . or an overeager Dutch naturalist more slowly.

“I didn’t see it. . . .” Maria murmured.

“Neither did the agouti.”

* * *

“Remember, I agreed only to a flyover, as far as the Madeira,” said Captain Neilsen. “This mission is just so we can warn our Manao friends of what they are up against, we are not here to make war on the Portuguese or try to sneak over to Tapajós. You have a ton of seeds on board. That’s plenty.”

“Understood,” said Henrique.

* * *

“That’s him,” said Henrique grimly, spyglass in hand. “In the rear of the first canoe. Bento Maciel Parente, the scum of the earth.

“Captain, did you really mean it when you said that this airship was unarmed, or were you holding out on me?”

“Sorry, we just have a bay for lowering the spy basket. I suppose it could be used to drop bombs, if we had them. The designers may even have had that possibility in mind. But it’s a moot point, since there are no bombs aboard.”

“Maria, you’re the science whiz, can you improvise something?”

“The target’s a little canoe, traveling in a mighty river. At our present altitude, the chance of setting it afire with a fused fuel flask is remote, I think, even if we managed to hit it in the first place.”

“But you can take us lower?”

The captain shook his head. “I am not going to bring our gas envelope within Portuguese musket range. We’re a much bigger target than they are, and if we’re holed, hydrogen can leak out and air can leak in.”

“But a bullet, fired upward, can hardly have much force,” Henrique pleaded. “And surely the hole made by a bullet is very small compared to this giant gas bag. How much leakage could there be?”

“If we lose just one-sixth of our hydrogen, and it’s replaced with air, the hydrogen-air mixture in the gas bag will become flammable. If lightning strikes—” The captain shuddered.

“Dammit,” said Henrique. “Is there nothing that can be done?”

“You could—never mind,” said Maria.

“What were you going to say?” Henrique demanded.

“You got that fancy rifle as a present from Captain de Vries. You could go down in the spy basket and shoot from there—while our envelope stayed safely out of harm’s way. But I think it’s too risky.”

“I’ll do it.”

“But the basket might be swinging like crazy. The airship would have to keep up with the speed of the canoes—which is the rowing speed on top of the current. It’s not like hovering in one spot and lowering Maurício.”

Captain Neilsen had listened to the interchange with unconcealed interest. “We can use our speed to get downstream of the canoes, then hover. You can shoot them as they come toward you. It will be an interesting experiment. I can imagine circumstances in which knowing that we can use a rifleman to clear enemies from a proposed landing site might come in handy.”

* * *

Maria looked anxiously at the winch. They had paid out several times as much steel wire as they had for Maurício’s test run. Would the wire hold, or would Henrique drop into the turbulent waters below?

* * *

Captain Neilsen has done well by me, thought Henrique. There had been a bit of oscillation, but the captain had managed to damp it down somewhat. It helped that there wasn’t much wind, here in the doldrums, and over land to boot. The basket still swung, a bit, but Henrique remembered a bit of reminiscence from Captain de Vries. We fire cannon at the peak of the upswing, when the ship seems to stand still, for an instant.

Henrique squeezed the trigger.

The bandeirante standing next to Parente slumped. “What the hell,” the leader said, scanning the trees on the nearest bank for signs of an enemy. He hadn’t thought to look up, and even if he had, the spy basket at least was lost in the glare of the sun.

Henrique fired again.

Bento clutched his breast. Slowly, like a giant tree blown over by a gust of wind, he toppled into the depths of the Amazon River.