Seas of Venus(18)

The guided bombs staggered in the air as their operators lost control. The shells dropped into the channel ten yards to either side of the torpedoboat, raising harmless columns of mud and water. Various forms of scavengers arrowed toward the circles of dead fish.

A smoke ring, then a huge waterspout rose from Channel 19. The concussion rocked the torpedoboat to port before its outriggers could compensate. It must have been a secondary explosion, shells and fuel aboard the surface skimmer, because the armor-piercing missiles didn't have warheads.

"Sometimes you get lucky," Dan said softly. He unplugged his helmet, then collapsed into the assistant gunner's seat as the flex wound back within its cradle. The display became a normal holographic gunsight again.

"First you have to be good," Johnnie said. "Sir."

"Blackhorse Three to bridge," Dan said with his eyes closed. "Your ship again, Ensign Samuels. I suggest you take us through Channel Seventeen when you get her turned around. Nineteen's got better clearance, but there may be somebody there still able to shoot. Three out."

"I doubt it," Johnnie said. "I doubt there's anything left the size of a matchbox. You did. . . . Uncle Dan, you were perfect."

His uncle smiled. He didn't open his eyes.

They had reached the point that the chart had marked with a blue line. The channel was deeper here. Samuels slowed L7521 and dropped her onto her main hull to turn around.

Johnnie stared at what he'd thought from the display might be a connection by which they could enter Channel 19 and get a direct shot at their attacker. Though there was standing water, there was also a solid belt of mangroves. The youth couldn't see the far channel through them.

"We couldn't have gotten through here after all," Johnnie admitted over the intercom.

Dan surveyed the terrain with a practiced eye, then shrugged. "We'd sure have tried if I hadn't gotten lucky with a missile," he said.

And if neither of those mortar shells had blasted us to atoms, Johnnie's mind added.

Aloud he said, "It's solid trees, Uncle Dan. They would have torn us apart if we'd hit them."

L7521 accelerated, kicking up a triple roostertail as she rose onto her foils.

Commander Cooke smiled humorlessly at his nephew. "I didn't say it was a good choice, lad," he said. "But losing is the worst choice of all."

A great, anvil-topped cloud of black smoke marked where the surface skimmer had exploded. As the hydrofoil passed that point in the parallel channel, Johnnie heard the crackle of a fuel fire across the narrow island.





8


They bit, they glared, gave blows like beams,

a wind went with their paws;

With wallowing might and stifled roar

they rolled on one another. . . .

—Leigh Hunt





Blackhorse Base was an atoll rather than an embayment of one of the larger land masses. Dozens of separate islands, most of them waving green plumage, formed a pattern like the individual blotches of a jaguar's rosette. Even where the connecting reef rose only occasionally above the sea, life forms clawed at one another for light and food and the sheer joy of slaughter.

By focusing his gunsight past one of those low spots in the reef, Johnnie glimpsed the great gray shapes of Blackhorse dreadnoughts in the central deep-water anchorage.

With a motion more like that of an elevator than a vehicle, L7521 slowed and settled toward the surface of the sea. The main hull slurped down and wallowed as the auxiliary thruster took over the load; the outriggers came out of the water.

Johnnie blinked. Something with suckers and bright, furious eyes stared back at him from the blade of the bow foil. It dropped away with regret as direct sunlight baked the plastic surface to which it clung.

How the creature had ever managed to get and hold a grip at seventy-plus knots. . . .

"Why did we stop out here?" Johnnie asked. They were half a mile from the nearest island, and he could see that the entrance to the central anchorage was some distance farther around the circuit of the atoll.

"Twelve knots only feels like being stopped," Dan chuckled. "And—it isn't good form to come racing up to a fleet's base. Even when it's your own and you're expected."

He pointed to the nearest of the islands which had been cleared for occupation. Railguns, dug into coral revetments, were tracking the hydrofoil.

Johnnie started to focus his gunsight for a closer look at the installations, but his uncle caught his hand. "Real bad idea," Dan said. "Aim your guns straight up."

L7521, now operating as a conventionally-hulled craft, puttered past an island at a safe three hundred yards from its luxuriant vegetation. Something looked out of a mangrove thicket and snarled. A machine-gunner along the starboard railing snarled back with a short burst.