Seas of Venus(26)

"Not those!" Johnnie shouted. "You'll sink them!"

When the big guns continued to rotate, the side of Johnnie's fist slammed the sailor's helmet hard enough to knock the man out of his seat. There was no time for delicacy.

"Use solids!" he warned, but he didn't have a commo helmet so nobody could hear him over the gunfire . . . and anyway, nobody would've listened to a young ensign-in-name-only.

But he was right.

A young officer leaned over the net-tender's rail with a sub-machine gun and fired most of the forty-round magazine straight down into the squid. Sparkling explosions blew the eyes to jelly and raised a cloud of lime dust from the huge parrot beak.

Sepia flooded the water around the squid; pigment darkened its flesh from mauve to greenish black.

A pair of tentacles unhooked from the rail and seized the Angels' officer. A third twisted the gun from the youth's hand as skillfully as if the squid still had eyes.

Johnnie switched his rifle to solids and fired a three-shot burst between the monster's eyes. He began walking down the squid's torso with further short bursts, probing for the ganglia. Bullets that exploded on the skin couldn't possibly kill the huge invertebrate.

The creature suddenly spasmed and blushed a pinkish white color. Its tentacles went slack, though the long pair still crisscrossed the net-tender amidships.

The young officer dropped onto the squid's sagging body. Its beak closed reflexively over his waist, but his bullets had powdered the hooked tip which would otherwise have punctured his intestines and crushed his spine.

One of the net-tender's crewmen with more courage than sense jumped into the roiling water and grabbed the stunned officer. In three frog-like kicks he made it back to the vessel's side. Four pairs of hands reached over desperately to pull him and his burden back aboard.

There was a quiver of movement from deep within the water.

"Look out!" Johnnie screamed as he pointed his rifle at where the newcomer would break surface—directly under the struggling men. It was no use trying to shoot through the water, but the target would appear jaws-first. . . .

A net-tender crewman, bleeding from a pressure cut on his cheek and forehead, tossed something that looked like a six-pack of beer over the side.

It must have been a bundle of rocket warheads with a short time-fuze, because it went off with a blast that was still bright orange after being filtered through the water.

The gout of water slammed the two vessels apart and lifted their facing sides. Johnnie fell down, but the net-tender's crew used the surge to help them snatch their fellows safe aboard.

A fragment of the squid's tentacle floated near M4434.

The other creature must have been a fish with a swim bladder to rupture in the explosion. It sank to the bottom, unseen save for a flash of terror through the bullet-spattered water.

"Cease fire!" roared Captain Haynes over the cockpit public-address system. "Cease fire! We're not here to waste ammunition!"

Johnnie's left hand was patting the magazine well of his borrowed rifle. He had ejected the empty magazine by rote, but he didn't have a full one with which to replace it.





11


Oh stay with company and mirth

And daylight and the air;

Too full already is the grave

Of fellows that were good and brave

And died because they were.

—A. E. Housman





"Sure you don't wanna come, sir?" said Walcheron. Instead of being angry, the sailor seemed pleased that Johnnie had knocked him down in order to save the Angels from the tender mercies of his twin-sixties. "There's an officers' club if you don't wanna . . . ?"

Johnnie forced a smile and waved. "No, I'll just wander. I—I've been in bars, but haven't had a chance to look at a fleet's base before."

"Hang on," warned the Angel driver as he engaged the torque converter of his prime mover. The flat-bed trailer, loaded with sailors from the hydrofoil in place of its more normal cargo, jerked at the end of its loose hitch toward the base cantina.

Captain Haynes and the two staff lieutenants who made up the negotiating team had already been carried two hundred yards to the Administration Building in a slightly-flossier conveyance, an air-cushion runabout. That left Johnnie and a single disconsolate sailor—the watch—alone with the M4434.

Johnnie nodded to the sailor and walked down the dock, coming as close to a saunter as the hot, humid air permitted him.

Paradise Base was a smaller, less polished version of Blackhorse Base. The Blackhorse torpedoboat was docked at the destroyer slip; the Angels had no hydrofoils of their own. The next facility around the circumference of the harbor was a drydock holding a dreadnought. The combination of concrete walls and a battleship completely hid everything else in that direction.