Seas of Venus(95)

The cobweb swooped. The edges of gossamer fabric extended like the wings of a bat driving food to the waiting jaws. Brainard saw the glitter in the corners of both his eyes. The stump was too far to—

An ivy tendril caught him. He tripped forward on his face. He flung his hands out, just short of the stump he had hoped would shelter him.

The creature swept over him as a shimmering shadow. It wrapped itself around the stump.

Brainard stared. The crystal fabric humped itself, driving spikes a foot long into the smoldering wood. The holes released spurts of steam which hung for a moment in the saturated atmosphere.

Wilding ran over to him. "You saved us, sir!" he cried. "That was brilliant! You saved us all!"

Brainard gaped at Wilding. He moved his foot in a disconnected attempt at removing it from the ivy's hooked grasp.

* * *





July 23, 381 AS. 0244 hours.


Officer-Trainee Brainard's console was a holographic triptych.

To the right, between Brainard and Watkins, K67's coxswain, the navigation board displayed the Gehenna Archipelago. Tonello's hovercraft and her consort, K44, probed for the Seatiger squadron which Cinc Wysocki believed was lurking there in ambush. Low islands and shallow straits scrolled down the panel of coherent light.

Brainard bent close to the left-hand panel which displayed schematics of the torpedocraft's signatures:

Thermal—

Fan #3's intake glowed 4o above ambient. Brainard touched keys to reroute the overdeck airflow, scattering the warmth in turbulence. Leaf, hunched over against the wind, ran toward the drive module to work on the underlying problem.

Electro-optical—

All the hovercraft's emitters were shut down. The blotched gray polymer of K67's hull quivered at between an 83% and 95% match for the surrounding sea in color and albedo. That was a closer copy than stretches of seawater a mile apart could achieve.

The vessel's computer fed low-voltage current through connections to the hull and skirts, modifying the camouflage pattern by the plastic's response to its electrical charge. It didn't require operator input.

Audio—

K67's sonic signature required an act of God to do it any good. There was damn-all Brainard could even attempt now that the CO had called for flank speed. Intake baffles flattened to smooth the path of air howling to feed the fans. Wind rush—over the deck, the gun tub, the cockpit and the crew stations—blended its myriad turbulences into the roar. Exhaust flow, ducted at high velocity to drive the vessel forward, hammered the night.

You couldn't have speed and silence. The best you could do was diffuse the cacophony so that it might come from anywhere in a mile radius instead of giving the enemy a sharp aiming point.

Brainard was doing what he could with the low on-deck air dams. He thought he'd shifted the calculated center of noise starboard and 3o astern, though the sonic ghost-vessel would keep a parallel course. Maybe the line of swampy islands a mile to starboard on the navigation screen would produce a confusing echo, but that was a matter for luck—temperature and air currents, nothing that a hovercraft's electronic countermeasures operator could do.

But something had to be done. Cinc Wysocki had been right. Brainard's center screen showed that the Seatigers had at least a pair of heavily-armed hydrofoil gunboats in the archipelago, five miles away and closing on the Herd patrol at 42o off the port bow.

Brainard heard the boonk! over the wind roar, but he didn't recognize the sound until the high-altitude pop followed three seconds later and the heavens turned lambent white in the glare of a star shell. The gunboats opened fire.

K44's gun tub fired back.

Brainard was lost in the virtual environment of his console. Nothing was real, not even the coxswain and Lieutenant Tonello beside him in the narrow cockpit. K44's signature brightened by ten orders of magnitude near the center of the situation display.

"Don't shoot!" he screamed. "For God's sake, don't!"

Outside the cockpit, the Seatiger gunboats disappeared behind the dazzle of their tracers and muzzle flashes. Each hydrofoil mounted a 3-inch gun in the bow and 1-inch Gatlings in tubs abaft the cockpit to either side. On the gunboats' present closing course, all their weapons could fire.

K44's tracers mounted in a high arc as the gunner attempted to achieve an impossible range. The scarlet marker compound burned out before the bullets started their vain downward tumble.

"Tonello to crew," rasped the CO's voice, distorted by static on the interphone's masking circuit. "Do not fire. Yee, I've locked the gun tub. Do not attempt to fire. Break. Blue Leader to—"

Brainard screamed silently as a pip glowed on the signature display. It was all right, tight-beam laser directed at K44 as Tonello gave orders to their consort, but nothing was all right.