The holographic display was still tuned to the upper-crust party. Leaf dived past it, but the voice of the commentator followed him down the stairwell saying, "And why is Prince Hal wearing the uniform of a high officer in Wysocki's Herd? Because it's his uniform! Yes, really, darlings, the most eligible bachelor in Wyoming Keep is a Free Companion!"
3
May 17, 382 AS. 1106 hours.
"Wilding," said Brainard, extending a hand over the rail to help the officer-trainee back aboard, "see if you can get a response on the radio. I can't raise a thing."
Wilding was barely able to move after boosting Leaf on board. Heat, the weight of his environmental suit, and the boggy soil into which he sank knee-deep at every step combined crushingly. "Sure," he gasped. How did you explain to a man like Brainard that other people had limits? "In a minute. Are the balloons okay?"
Radio communication was as undependable as radar imaging in the charged Venerian atmosphere. The alternatives were long-wave communication through the sea itself, and modulated laser. Long wave was slow, and the apparatus was too heavy to be mounted on a hovercraft. Laser commo was fast and virtually proof against interception, but it was line-of-sight only.
The answer was to raise the transmitter a thousand feet or more above the surface by balloon, bringing distant receivers above the horizon.
Brainard shook his head. "Sorry," he said. "All that gear's gone."
Wilding was exhausted, but the man he had rescued moved like a zombie in a suit twice the proper size. Bozman, the assistant motorman, supported Leaf's bulging body to his station just aft the torpedo controls.
"I got the auxiliary running, chief," Bozman chattered. "We'll have you plugged into the air conditioning soonest."
Leaf's suit dribbled pools of slime on the deck as the motorman moved. "How's the main motors?" he asked.
Wilding found the motorman's words remarkable both for their huskiness and for the fact that they were directed at his regular duties.
"They're fucked," said Caffey in a grim voice. "The commo's fucked. And we're fucked."
The torpedoman had clipped a light machine-gun—his personal weapon, since they weren't stock issue for hovercraft—to the seaward rail. The gun tub was rotated inland, covering the pool fifty feet away where the giant snake and spider had hunted, but no direction was safe.
Brainard glanced at Caffey without speaking. The torpedoman grimaced, then broke eye contact by calling to his striker, "Wheelwright! Bring another drum of ammo."
Wilding slid into the cockpit and reconnected the hose to his environmental suit. The seepage of cool, dry air through the suit's lining steadied his mind before it could make any practical difference to his body.
Brainard had brought the console displays up as soon as the auxiliary drive provided power for them. The radio transmitted an any-station emergency signal; K67's main computer would key the crewmen's commo helmets if there were a response.
There wasn't a damn thing else to do, except check the balloon ascender gear. The console had a scarlet Not Ready message under that heading.
A glance astern showed why. K67 had been inverted at some point as she spun ashore. The last five feet of the deck had been scraped, carrying away two decoy launchers and the long-range communications apparatus.
For the first time since a cruiser invisible over the horizon began to shell them, Wilding had leisure to consider their situation. Caffey was right. They didn't have a prayer.
K67 lay in a salt marsh inside this nameless island's outer barrier of coral. The coral had shredded the hovercraft's skirts, but that was probably the reason any of them were still alive. A rigid-hulled vessel would have disintegrated on impact, but the tough, flexible skirts had scrubbed away K67's velocity as they abraded.
Air-cushion torpedoboats hung their pair of primary weapons in the plenum chamber. Both torpedoes had been torn from their mountings as K67 bellied into the bog. Their safety mechanisms kept them inert despite the shock.
The torpedoes lay like a pair of broken sticks in the path the hovercraft tore through the vegetation. The body of one had been crushed like a pinched grassblade, while the warhead of the other lay askew with half its attachment lugs stripped. Hungry reeds nuzzled the weapons in vain.
The warheads contained a nominal thousand pounds of barakite explosive. Their blast was designed to penetrate the main armor belt of a superdreadnought. If either weapon had detonated during the crash, there would have been nothing left of K67 and her crew.
Inshore, the jungle ascended in terraces of dark green toward the peak that the hovercraft's database indicated was a thousand feet above mean sea level. Mist and the foliage bulging from the slopes prevented Wilding from checking the accuracy of the charts.