The Mouflon started to answer her helm, but for Wilding the sensation was almost lost in the vessel's pitch and yaw through the wave. A 15,000-ton cruiser requires a great deal of time to change heading by 120°.
"Sir?" said the Mouflon's flag captain. "Should we, ah . . . detach some light craft to tend the vessels that have been disabled?"
"Negative," Captain Glenn snapped. "We have a job to do. We'll rescue survivors as soon as the Seatigers surrender. Until then, they'll have to fend for themself."
"I'm done, sir," muttered the medic.
Glenn flexed his shoulders and winced. By chance, he was glaring straight at Officer-Trainee Wilding as he concluded, "We're not running a nursery. It's the law of the jungle!"
15
May 18, 382 AS. 0626 hours.
Ensign Brainard looked downslope as the warning rang in his ears. With its keen sense of smell, the reptile would track them as inexorably as the tide came in.
OT Wilding leaped down the steep slope, sacrificing himself to the lizard's jaws in order to save the rest of them. Wilding repeated, "Get back!" even while he slid and tumbled along the track the cypress bulldozed.
It would work. The gift of one life would conceal the existence of five more from the short-sighted reptile.
Brainard opened his mouth to shout, "Back from the edge!" to his remaining crew.
Off the beach far below, the vine-covered torpedocraft sat like a flaw against the beautiful water surface, which quivered with the thousand colors of a fire opal.
Ted Holman had sacrificed his life to torpedo the Wiesel—and save K67 as it fled under Brainard's command. Brainard wasn't going to abandon Hal Wilding as well.
The monitor lizard lifted onto its clawed toes to scramble over the debris. Its great head swung from side to side, bringing one black eye, then the other, to bear on the officer-trainee. It was the tongue, quivering like a fork-tailed serpent, which would guide the beast to its kill.
"Get back!" Brainard shouted to his crew. He leaped down from the crest to rescue his executive officer.
Brainard stayed upright for half the distance. He was running out of control, but his legs pumped swiftly enough that his boots crashed down each time just ahead of his center of mass.
Wilding lay spread-eagled in the muddy saddle. He rose to his hands and knees, then tried to force himself upright with the chewed rifle which he had somehow managed to grip during his fall. Wilding's back was toward the oncoming monster.
A sprig of running cedar, bruised but not destroyed by the avalanche of timber, lifted a feathery frond at motion and the chance of a meal. The tiny suckers on the underside of its leaves slipped from the ensign's heel, but the touch was enough to cost Brainard his balance. Instinct flung his arms and legs out in a grotesque cartwheel which could do nothing to save him.
Brainard hit on his shoulders. He somersaulted, chance rather than skill, until the roots of a tree demolished by the avalanche flung him into the air. He sailed twenty feet, scraped down on his left hip and arm, and rolled sideways into the man he had come to rescue.
"Come on," Brainard said.
Brainard's voice was a whisper because all the breath had been knocked out of his lungs. He stood up, trying to center himself as the universe spun around him. He had to concentrate on the job. Nothing but the job.
The sun seemed brighter. He'd lost his helmet. His rifle and the pack with his extra ammo had gone too, flung off in his chaotic dance downslope.
The laser communicator was still strapped to his chest. It clacked against Wilding's crutch as Brainard tried to grip the officer-trainee for a packstrap carry. Brainard slapped the quick-release buckle and dropped the communicator to which he had clung with hysterical determination from the time they abandoned K67.
"We can't . . . ," Wilding wheezed.
Brainard took a step. His boot slipped. He had to steady himself with his free hand. A curtain of tears and terror turned the torn slope into a gray-green blur.
Another step. Piled timber crashed nearby. A clod of mud jolted Brainard's back.
The stench of death drove aside every other sensory impression. Wilding twisted out of Brainard's grasp. The ensign turned to seize Wilding again and saw the monitor lizard.
The beast's forelegs and belly glistened with mud, but its hooked claws were clean. The beast's scales were knobby and thick enough, even on the wrinkled skin of its long throat, to shatter a rifle bullet.
Not that either man had a working rifle.
The monitor's open mouth stank with the rotting effluvium of its previous meals. Its tongue flicked out once more and sucked back as the beast struck at Wilding.
Wilding thrust the rifle he used for a crutch into the lizard's mouth, wedging it upright between the upper and lower palates. He clung to the prop. The beast hissed like a boiler venting and reached out with its claws.