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.
A command overlay pulsed slowly in the upper right quadrant of the gunsight hologram, then disappeared.
Johnnie blinked. He reached for the keyboard—and remembered he was in a gun tub, not at a control console. He slapped down his visor, manually keyed his helmet's access channel, and said to the artificial intelligence, "Review past minute's visuals."
The helmet went eep and projected what Johnnie had seen a minute before into his visor. The visor image formed a ghost over the nearly identical view currently in the gunsight, but this time Johnnie was ready for the warning pulse.
Dan put the pocket unit away and watched intently as his nephew worked.
"Sir," Johnnie said, "we've been painted by radar."
As he spoke, the pulsed overlay reappeared in the gunsight, echoing the data sent to the main unit in the cockpit.
Dan touched his helmet keypad and said, "Twin mount to bridge. We're under radar observation. Over."
"Bridge to twin mount," replied Ensign Samuels in a wary voice. "We're approaching the Braids. You're—"
Samuels remembered who was on the other end of the link. "You may be seeing reflections scattered from islets. Over."
"Negative!" Johnnie hissed, bending close to his uncle to avoid using the intercom. "That's—"
"Bridge, that's a negative," Dan said sharply. "That's track—"
"—track-while-scan!" Johnnie concluded, identifying the pattern of high-power and low-power pulses which swept the torpedoboat.
"—while-scan," Dan continued. "Who the hell do you have on your EW board? Over."
Details sharpened in the view of the islands toward which L7521 sped. Computer enhancement at long range smoothed objects into a calculated sameness. As the need for enhancement lessened, the foliage appeared in its spiky, curling multiplicity.
There were mangroves and a breeze riffling reed tops into amber motion; but there was no sign of man.
"Shit!" said Ensign Samuels.
Then, in a controlled voice, the torpedoboat's commander continued, "Bridge to twin mount. Sir, the electronic warfare console was disconnected. The console is operating again now. You—"
Operating now that it's too late, Johnnie thought.
"—were right, of course. Over."
"Samuels," Dan said, "ask Captain Haynes to lock into Intercom 3, please. Soonest!"
The click of another station joining Johnnie and his uncle cut off the first syllable of Captain Haynes' voice saying, "—mander, is this some joke of yours?"
Dan rose to his feet and looked toward the cockpit. Haynes was standing also; their eyes met. Johnnie glanced from one man to the other—and turned back to the holographic display.
"No joke, Captain," Dan said. "If you haven't decided to lay on an escort for us—"
" . . . f course not!" Haynes' protest was stepped on by the ongoing transmission.
"Then we have to assume that somebody's stationed here to make sure that you and I don't get to Blackhorse Base," Dan said. "Tell Bradley to turn ten degrees to port so we're headed toward Channel 17 instead of 19. That should get us more sensor data."
Johnnie ran a chart of the Braids on his visor. If he flexed his helmet to the tit on the gun mount, he could convert the sight into an omni-function display—
But right at the moment, it looked as though having the gunsight working was more important.
"I can't believe either the Warcocks or Flotilla Blanche would act so dishonorably!" Haynes said.
L7521's front foil nosed into the turn. The port stern outrigger telescoped enough to keep the deck more or less perpendicular to the "down" of centrifugal force; the torpedoboat heeled like a motorcycle.
The Braids were a thousand square miles of weathered pillow lava over which the sea had risen at the end of the terraforming process. The result was thousands of islands, ranging in size from specks to narrow blotches that straggled along for several miles at low water.
None of the land rose more than ten feet above the level of high tide; none of the channels wandering through the mass was more than twenty feet deep when the solar tide was at its lowest; and the sum of land and water together was very nearly mean sea level. The through-channels were numbered, but no one had bothered to name any of the swampy islands.
"Do you think the people running Carolina Dome are that honorable, Captain?" Dan said sharply. "You know as well as I do that some of the smaller mercenary companies are no better than pirates, picking up salvage on the fringes when the big fleets engage. A few politicians could hire one of them under the table. . . ."
Johnnie touched his helmet keypad and whispered orders to the artificial intelligence. His gunsight, at full magnification, was centered on the point at which the target should first appear. The sight picture was still an empty channel choked from either side by black mangroves, but the electronic warfare suite was beginning to draw a picture of the ambusher.
Radar signals from the other craft located the emitter but could not identify the hull on which the radar was mounted. When the waiting vessel started its engines in reaction to the torpedoboat's course change, L7521's passive sensors fed back the faint sound signatures for comparison to known templates.
When the vessel moved—out of Channel 17 and away from the hydrofoil rather than on a direct interception course—the torpedoboat's data bank achieved a 98 percent probable identification. The lurking vessel was a surface skimmer whose flexible skirts balanced it above the water on a cushion of air.
The air cushion worked as well on land as water. In shifting away from L7521, the skimmer slid over a neck of land which the chart showed as being above water level at the present tidal state. The ambusher settled again in a slough connected to Channel 19.
"Sir," Dan said, "I have small-craft experience that you don't. Ensign Samuels will of course command his vessel . . . but with your permission, I'll take overall control of the operation."
Johnnie risked a glance around to see the captain's face, raised above the cockpit coaming. The rivalry between Cooke and Haynes was as bitter as many religious conflicts; but the men were, literally, in the same boat.
Haynes licked his lips. "We can't turn and run, then?" he said.
"From their acceleration," Dan said, proving that he'd kept an eye on his visor display while talking to his superior, "they're running light—no torpedoes. They'll have at least thirty knots on us, flat out. Our best hope is that they don't know we've noticed them."
"All right, Cooke," said Captain Haynes. He swallowed. "You're in operational command. I'll make room here in the cockpit."
"No time, Captain," Dan said as he tried to unscrew the cap which protected the hard-wire connector on the gun mount. It stuck. "I'll run it from here, if—"
Johnnie rapped the cap twice, sharply, with the butt of his service knife.
His uncle twisted again. The cap spun loose from the grip of microlife which had managed to root into the threads of supposedly impervious plastic.
"I'll run it from here," Dan concluded as he pulled glass-fiber line from the tit and connected it to his helmet.
L7521 rushed toward the Braids at seventy knots. Channel 17 wasn't an ideal route since it narrowed halfway through the mass to little more than the width of the torpedoboat. That was something to worry about if they got so far.
Dan converted the gunsight display to a holographic chart of a square mile of the Braids. A blue line and a red bead plotted the torpedoboat's planned course and the ambusher's location, respectively.
Johnnie swallowed and flipped up the twin mount's mechanical backsight. Blurred vegetation hopped and quivered through the sighting ring. The mechanical sights were for emergencies only—
And the lord knew, this was an emergency.
"Three to bridge," Dan said. "Is the Automatic Defense System—"
As the commander spoke, the miniature four-barreled Gatling roused on the centerpost of the cockpit coaming.
"—right, we need it live," Dan said approvingly. "Now, take us up Channel 18 instead. Over."
"Sir," Samuels blurted, "that's blocked—" Then, "Aye-aye, sir. Sorry."
The ADS fired high-velocity 50-grain flechettes. The unit had its own scanner and, when live, operated independently to engage any target that came within a hundred yards of the torpedoboat on an intercepting course. The weapon was switched off at most times—it would riddle an approaching admiral's car in harbor as cheerfully as it would bat a hostile missile—but it gave the torpedoboat a modicum of protection against guided weapons in combat.
"Sir?" Samuels added. "We'll have to throttle back to make the chicane at the mouth of Eighteen. Over."
"That's fine, Ensign," Dan replied absently as the AI ran possible scenarios, one after another, on the sight display. "So long as we don't try to run, it'll just look as though we're having problems with our charts. Over."
He looked at Johnnie, keyed intercom, and muttered, "Which thank god we're not. These charts—"
Dan nodded toward the holographic web of waterways. The glowing blue line—L7521—maneuvered against the red line of the surface skimmer, until a line of red dots joined the two.
The blue line ended.
"—are all that's going to save us. If anything does."
He grinned at his nephew. "That and you spotting the radar signal when whoever was at the EW console slept."
"Is Haynes sitting at that console?" Johnnie asked.
Dan shook his head. On the display's next scenario, the blue line cut across a reed bed that Johnnie didn't think was a channel.
It wasn't a channel. The line carried forward on inertia, then stopped—hopelessly aground. Red dots indicating gunfire from the ambusher touched the point which marked the torpedoboat.
A new scenario began.
"I don't like Haynes," Dan said. "But he's a fanatic about getting whatever job's in front of him done. By the book—but done."
The low-lying islands formed a mottled backdrop to the display now. Through the cut-out in the hologram for the iron sights, Johnnie scanned the foliage for any sign of the surface skimmer.
Nothing. Of course nothing. You could hide a battleship, much less an air cushion vehicle, among the dense vegetation of the Braids.
The ambush might very well have gone unnoticed—until it was sprung. Personnel on a boat ferrying people back from leave couldn't be expected to be very alert.
And as Dan had noted, the surface skimmer could run the hydrofoil down if necessary.
L7521 heeled hard to starboard, slowing and juddering as her wake overran the decelerating foils. Sailors swung and cursed. They were trying to hold on with one hand while their real concern was for the weapons they might have to use at any instant.
The mouth of Channel 18 was lost to sight among scores of mangrove-dripping notches in neighboring islands.
While his uncle attempted to bend the future into an acceptable pattern on the big hologram, Johnnie kept a real-time course display in one quadrant of his visor. The youth grimaced at the situation.
The other vessel had stopped using radar when L7521 came within ten miles; passive sensors were sufficient for it to accurately track the oncoming torpedoboat. Though the ambusher quivered as its prey changed direction, the commander of the surface skimmer did not bother shifting from his hiding place in the relatively-broad Channel 19 as the torpedoboat twisted into the neighboring waterway.
Johnnie kept the twin barrels of his guns aligned with the pointing line in his visor—a vector drawn by his AI toward where the surface skimmer lurked a mile up the parallel channel. He could see only foliage, though from fifty feet or even closer there was an obvious bright diversity of other life growing in the mangroves.
"They'll sweep across a low spot with all guns blazing, then, sir?" Johnnie asked over the intercom. He spoke quietly so that his uncle could pretend not to have heard if the chart demanded his full attention.
The torpedoboat sliced through a stretch of open water so narrow that reed tops slapped the bow like gunshots. Branches wove together above them, throwing the vessel into shadow.
A thirty-pound frog leaped from a mangrove trunk and sailed a hundred feet through the air on its broad feet. Its open-mouthed course took it, like a whale swallowing plankton, into a mass of insects startled aloft by the hydrofoil.
The frog slid neatly into the water. The jaws of something far larger clopped over the amphibian in a shower of spray.
L7521 banked to port, then starboard again, as it followed the meandering waterway. The directional changes were so great that Ensign Samuels cut the hydrofoil's speed to scarcely more than that required to keep it up on the outriggers.
"No, they won't take that risk unless they have to," Dan replied. "They'll stay out of sight and pop at us with indirect fire until a shell or two gets through."
Instead of course plots, a view of the long island separating Channels 18 and 19 now filled the display. Dan's artificial intelligence overlaid bright lines across the swampy land. The individual lines ranged in color from orange through yellow to chartreuse.
"I . . . ," Johnnie said. He swallowed and squeezed tighter on the grips of the twin mount.
The channel broadened into a mirror of black water. The mangroves no longer closed the canopy above. The hydrofoil's bow wave faceted the surface into dazzling jewels.
"I wouldn't think pirates, looters, would have that kind of equipment," Johnnie said as he visualized death dropping unanswerably from the sky.
"Jack de Lessups of Flotilla Blanche is a friend of mine," Dan said calmly. "But I don't think he's too honorable to put me out the way before a battle—if it could be done without anybody knowing."
The torpedoboat accelerated again as the channel straightened. Halfway through the Braids, Channel 18 ended in a marsh too shallow, even at high tide, for a hydrofoil to navigate. Until that point, it provided a deceptively open course.
Dan grinned at his nephew. "You might say that Jack respects me," he added.
Johnnie wouldn't have heard the choonk of the mortar firing if he hadn't been expecting it. Even then it might have been his imagination—
Until the miniature Gatling gun on the cockpit lifted like a dog raising its muzzle to sniff the air.
There was a black speck in the sky, a shell just above the zenith of its arc. The Automatic Defense System twitched, locked, and ripped the air with a burst at the frequency of a dental drill. Yellow flame stabbed out of the spinning barrels; though the rounds were caseless, propellant gas puffed from the breech mechanism and blew grit over the men in the open cockpit.
The mortar bomb exploded, a flash of orange in a splotch of filthy smoke. Fragments of hot casing shredded leaves and created a circular froth in the channel. The bits which pattered onto the torpedoboat's deck weren't heavy enough to do damage at this range.
Light winked in the sky. A camera in the nose of the shell sent television pictures down a fiber-optics line to an operator aboard the surface skimmer. The operator had planned to steer the shell's tailfins by commands sent up the same line. Now the gossamer trail of glass drifted harmlessly from the sky, writhing in the turbulence from the explosion.
The operator would be shifting his console to control one of the two further rounds which burped from the clip-fed mortar as soon as the ADS detonated the first bomb.
L7521 had been accelerating. Samuels continued pouring the coal to his thrusters, closing the range to the hidden ambusher. The Blackhorse vessel was in trouble if it came off the outriggers here, because the depth of the channel might not be enough to float the hydrofoil's main hull.
They were in trouble no matter what.
Johnnie checked for at least the tenth time to be sure that his twin mount was set to fire explosive bullets. If he got a shot at the enemy, his burst had to count. He figured his best bet was to blow gaping holes in the hovercraft's plenum chamber, disabling the craft for hours and possibly—just possibly—giving the hydrofoil a chance to run clear.
The ADS snarled like a bumblebee larger even than the jungles of Venus had spawned. One of the pair of guided shells exploded at its apex. The speck of the other continued to drop while the Gatling spun to track it, then fired again.
The blast rocked Johnnie down in his seat. Something whined angrily off the neck flare of his helmet. Water just off the torpedoboat's bow spouted six feet high where a large chunk, perhaps the nose cone, hit.
The surface skimmer was paralleling them unseen on the other side of the island to starboard. Johnnie aimed where the AI told him to, praying for a target.
Nothing but mangroves, tens to hundreds of yards of rippling black trunks. Too dense for sight, too dense for bullets to penetrate.
The chart in the holographic display unrolled as L7521 sped down the channel. Because of the chart's reduced scale, its movement appeared leisurely compared to that of the trees and the squawking, startled animals ducking to concealment among them.
Over the scream of wind and the thrusters, the hostile mortar went choonk, choonk, choonk. The enemy had fired a full clip. There wasn't a prayer that a single ADS would detonate all three of the guided rounds.
Two crewmen with set, powder-blackened faces poised on the edge of the cockpit. One held a fresh drum of ammunition for the little Gatling; the other sailor would jerk the spent drum out of the way when the gun stuttered to silence. The Automatic Defense System blazed out a hundred flechettes per second—and the feed drum held only five hundred rounds.
A blue line unrolled across the chart display, marking a neck of land so marshy that the water stood on it. At top speed, L7521 might be able to cut over that part of the island before her outriggers ripped off and—
"Uncle Dan!" Johnnie screamed. "A mile ahead there's—"
"Too far!" Dan shouted.
The ADS fired, blasting the first of the shells. The Gatling turned, cracked out a single flechette, and froze with its ammunition supply exhausted as the two remaining bombs bored down under the guidance of their operators.
Ensign Samuels emptied his handgun skyward as his men struggled to reload the Automatic Defense System. Even if the bullets chanced to hit, they didn't have enough energy to explode the shells.
The shore to starboard sucked away from the torpedoboat. Molluscs riffled the air above a sandbar; the water in the slough beyond was too deep for mangroves, but great carnivorous lilies spread across its protected surface. The land beyond the slight embayment was marked by a yellow-green line on the chart.
Johnnie's hand curved back to his own pistol.
Dan, controlling all L7521's systems through his helmet, fired the cage of armor-piercing missiles on the torpedoboat's stern.
The crash of the first-stage rocket motors was echoed an instant later by a sharper crack as each 5-inch missile went supersonic and the ramjet sustainers ignited. The six rounds rippled off in pairs. Their backblasts enveloped the vegetation to port in steam and yellow scorch marks. Chips of mangrove wood exploded from the dense growth hiding the surface skimmer from its prey.
The missiles had sharp noses and enough velocity to damage the armor of a battleship, an ideal combination for penetrating brush with minimal deflection. Dan had waited to fire the salvo until the forest between him and the ambusher was thin as it was going to be—
At any time before shells blew L7521 to scraps and foam.
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.