Seas of Venus(13)

Dan focused on the sight picture, then frowned and rose from his seat to look over the armor. "Cover that," he ordered, pointing off the right bow. "Samuels is going to pass too close."

The sights went direct when Johnnie swung the guns with his right-hand control. The panoramic blur of land against sea became a huge mass to the left—probably the sub-continental Omphalos Sathanou, though that meant the hydrofoil's speed had been above the seventy knots Johnnie was guessing. To the right was an unnamed islet from which trailed a fur of water-brushing tree branches.

"All weapon stations, track right," Johnnie's earphones ordered in a voice that wasn't his uncle's.

The strait separating Omphalos from its minor satellite was a quarter mile broad, but only within a hundred feet of the islet was there a band of water which had enough current to clear it of mud and tannin. To the islet's right—south—clumps of reeds warned that the water there was dangerously shallow also.

Dan charged and aimed the automatic rifle which had been placed between his seat and the armored tub. "Bloody cowboy," he muttered.

"What is it?" Johnnie asked, trying to scan both the holographic image and the expanse of green/brown/corpse-finger white beyond it. "What am I looking for?"

"Any damn thing that moves."

"Watch it," the ensign in the cockpit ordered.

Dan glanced sideways toward his nephew. "Remember," he said, "this is who you get crewing hydrofoils. Don't ever pretend people are going to be other than you know they're going to be."

L7521 slammed past the islet, her drive noise echoing as a thrum/thrum/thrum from the vegetation. The vessel's outriggers threw up triple roostertails. The wakes hunched waist-high across the shallows, churning mud from the bottom.

A ripple of fans waved nervously, the raking gills of giant barnacles or tube-worms.

A tentacle—a tendril?—shot out of the forest toward the L7521. It was gray and featureless, suggesting neither the plant kingdom nor the animal. Everything behind the rounded tip was a twisting cylinder a yard in circumference. The creature's lunge carried it a hundred feet over the water churned by the disappearing hydrofoil.

A sailor on the stern rail fired his machine-gun. The pintle-mounted weapon wobbled, throwing its helix of golden tracers above the creature. Johnnie, glancing over his shoulder at the target his own weapons wouldn't bear on, thought a few of the bullets might possibly have hit.

Possibly.

"What was it?" Johnnie asked.

"Cover your sector," his uncle ordered, gesturing the twin mount forward as his right hand returned the rifle to the slot beside his seat. "Don't worry about the stuff that's over."

"Yessir," Johnnie muttered, his face cold. The hydrofoil banked slightly, hiding the creature which was already withdrawing into the vegetation from which it had sprung.

Uncle Dan grinned. "Good job, John," he said. "A lot of veterans would've shot off ammo they might need later."

"I won't get out of position again . . . sir," Johnnie said.

"Wish I was sure that I wouldn't," Dan said.

The older man looked back past the stern, where even the islet was rapidly disappearing. "What was it?" he added. "Something big and nasty and fast. But not fast enough. May all our problems be like that."

"Uncle Dan," Johnnie said, keeping his eyes rigidly on his sight hologram. "Is the Senator a coward?"

"Arthur?" the mercenary officer said. "Hell no! Where did you get that idea?"

"He joined the Blackhorse when you did—"

"Right. He met your mother when she was seeing me off for training."

"—but he resigned after his first battle. He was afraid."

"He wasn't any more scared than I was," Dan said. "The Elizabeth got hammered out of line. Damned lucky we weren't sunk. . . ."

He put his arm on Johnnie's shoulder and kept it there until the younger man met his eyes. "Listen to me, Johnnie," Dan went on. "Arthur's first battle convinced him that Venus had to be united, so that some day there wouldn't be any battles. That doesn't make him a coward."

Johnnie nodded. "But he was wrong, wasn't he? I mean, you can't change human nature, can you?"

Dan grinned without humor. "I hope Arthur wasn't wrong," he said. "Because it convinced me of the same thing."





7


The Devil is driving both this tide,

and the killing-grounds are close,

And we'll go up to the Wrath of God. . . .

—Rudyard Kipling





Fifteen miles from the Braids, Johnnie cranked up the gunsight magnification and added computer enhancement to eliminate the haze. He panned the guns slowly for an early view of the band of swampy islands and shallow channels through which L7521 would pass. Beside him, Dan dictated into a pocket workstation.