Seas of Venus(116)

A few drops of blood speckled the wall. Mooker had managed to clip the end of his own big toe.

The seaman giggled. He leaped from the bed, spinning and cutting at the air. He had left the bedding behind. Contractions ran across his nude body, sharply defining alternate groups of muscles.

Mooker's skin shone with sweat although the room's environmental system was working normally. Leaf and Caffey backed as far away as they could get in the small room.

The seaman stood against the door, drawing disjointed patterns with the cutting bar. One swipe struck the corner of a locker. The blade caught momentarily. Leaf tensed, but Mooker dragged the weapon clear with a convulsive effort. He waggled it toward the noncom.

Caffey fumbled in his tunic pocket.

The seaman stared fixedly at him. The cutting bar nodded. Its blunt tip was less than a yard from the torpedoman's face.

Mooker slashed behind himself without looking around.

Leaf dodged back, barely in time. He was sweating also.

"Hey, Leaf," said Caffey. He was balancing a drug injector on his thumb. "You want one a these?"

The seaman froze. Behind Mooker's back, Leaf reached to his own collar and ripped off one of the rank insignia studs.

Caffey flipped the drug injector. The cone of gray plastic wobbled over Mooker's head. Leaf caught and palmed it as the seaman turned.

"Give me . . . ," Mooker demanded in a voice that would have sounded unexpectedly bestial even coming from a wolverine. He raised the cutting bar. Blood from his severed toe pooled on the floor around him.

"Sure, Mookie," Leaf said. He flicked his rank insignia onto the upper bunk.

Mooker trembled like a drive motor lugging. Caffey's mouth opened to scream, but at the last instant the seaman leaped for the bed.

Leaf snatched the door open. Both noncoms slipped into the corridor and slammed the door behind them.

The thunderous music resumed almost at once.

"My God," Leaf groaned. His eyes were closed. "My God, I didn't think. . . ."

"Shit," said Caffey. "No choice but the Shore Police now—omigod!"

Lieutenant-Commander Congreve strode down the corridor to them. He wore a dress uniform; his saucer hat was adjusted perfectly to the required tilt.

"What in the hell is going on here?" Congreve demanded. He did not so much shout as raise his cold voice to be heard over the chant booming from Mooker's billet.

Leaf and Caffey snapped to attention. Leaf hoped the other noncom could think of a way to explain—

But Congreve didn't want explanations, he wanted victims. There were a lot of officers like that. . . .

"You! Leaf!" Congreve said. "Open your hands."

"Sir, it's not—" Leaf said as he obeyed. The unused injector dropped to the floor.

Congreve glared at him. "The first thing you can do is take off the other rank stud, Seaman Leaf," he said. "You won't be needing it for a long time—if ever. Now, just what is going on here?"

Leaf swallowed. He was braced so stiffly that he was becoming dizzy, as though being rigid would protect him from what was happening.

"Ah, sir," said Caffey. "It's just, you know, a little party."

The lieutenant-commander's face went red, then white. He stared at the name tape on Caffey's tunic. "Well," he said in a voice of dangerous calm, "we'll just see about that."

Congreve pushed open the door of the billet and said, "All right, stand at—"

The scream and the whine of the cutting bar played a descant to the rumbling bass line from the recorder.

Leaf pulled the door closed. "Let's get the fuck outa here," he said.





14


May 18, 382 AS. 0622 hours.




Filters of cyan, magenta, and yellow shifted across Wilding's vision with every beat of his heart. After hundreds of repetitions, the colors locked suddenly into a polychrome whole. The officer-trainee watched Ensign Brainard take a grenade out of his tunic pocket.

A pair of grenades turned up when Wilding searched K67's ammunition locker. Nobody remembered why they were aboard. Maybe to discourage sea life, maybe because somebody had the notion they'd be useful if the hovercraft's crew had to board another vessel—a vanishingly improbable event.

But the survivors needed them now.

Brainard grimaced, tossing the grenade an inch or two on his palm to judge its heft. He stepped toward the giant cedar. Caffey and Leaf fell in beside him. They were trying to look in all directions at once.

"I said, 'Get to cover,'" the ensign ordered harshly.

The torpedoman opened his mouth to protest.

"I'll have five seconds after I pull this," Brainard said. His finger tapped the grenade's safety pin. "I don't intend to spend it tripping over you two. Get to cover."