Twenty
Alia grinned while she pounded one fist on our gunwale. She shook her other fist at the cutter. “You can’t catch us now!” She kept her feet even as our boat leapt, then crashed down in the chop along the cliff base.
I lacked the girl’s sea legs, so I death-gripped the bucking gunwale with both hands.
Trueborns have a saying—it only took me a couple years on my parents’ world to learn that Trueborns have a saying for everything—about the folly of counting unborn poultry. But I grinned, too.
I nodded down my optics and zoomed on the cutter’s gun crew. They hadn’t budged. In another minute our progress would interpose the cliffs between us and the cutter. At the big ship’s stern, something moved.
I pointed and called over surf crash to Pyt, “What are they doing?”
He squinted at the big ship. “The cutter would ground in the shallows. So they’re putting in a shallow draft launch to chase us.” He leaned into the tiller while Alia tugged on lines for reasons I didn’t understand. Their combined action slipped us past surf that boiled around a garage-sized boulder.
Then Pyt shook his head. “I don’t understand why they’re bothering. A motor launch is barely faster than we are. And once we make the Inside Passage, they’ll never find us.”
I watched as the Tressens swung the craft that would hunt us out on davits over the ship’s side and lowered it on ropes and pulleys toward the waves.
I rolled my eyes. “Crap.”
Pyt raised his glasses, focused; then his brow wrinkled. “The fools are putting their launch in upside down!”
I cocked my head. A twelve-place skimmer’s inverted-bathtub hull would look like an overturned open boat if you had never seen an air-cushion vehicle. I sighed again. “It’s not a boat. It’s a light-duty utility vehicle. It blows air out from beneath that skirt around its belly and floats above the water. Or the land.”
Pyt snorted. “They have no such—.”
Alia said, “It’s true! It looks just like the pictures!”
Pyt turned to me, green eyes ablaze, and pointed at the skimmer. “You haven’t punished Iridia enough? You’ve given more machines to the Tressens? To hunt down the last of us?”
“We didn’t do that. That’s a Yavi machine.”
“Yavi?” Pyt frowned.
I said, “Another planet. If you think the Trueborns punished you, wait ’til you meet some Yavis.”
In the distance, the skimmer floated in the water, awaiting a helmsman. A dozen riflemen scrambled over a cargo net draped over the cutter’s side and dropped into the open skimmer’s troop space as it bobbed.
Nine of the squad wore Yavi body armor and carried assault rifles with barrels so slender that they had to be Yavi needle guns. One man, thinner than the others, wore Tressen naval coveralls and carried a gunpowder sidearm. The last two Yavi carried crew served needle machine guns. The gunners levered the needlers into the skimmer’s midships gun mounts and fitted their drum magazines with a weary competence that couldn’t have been Tressen. I whistled. “And you’re about to meet some.”
The skimmer driver fired up his vehicle, and that familiar sucking whine snarled across the water. A fog of atomized seawater obscured the skimmer’s skirt, and the vehicle rose two feet above the waves.
Pyt’s eyes widened, and he glanced back and forth between the passage entrance, now thirty yards ahead of us, and the wobbling skimmer. “How fast is that thing?”
The skimmer’s driver got his vehicle trimmed. Its nose dipped, and it shot toward us, accelerating toward sixty miles per hour.
Pyt swore.
Alia slapped her forehead. “Ooh!”
Then our creaking boat passed into shadow, behind the cliff’s shoulder. For a moment, we could neither see nor hear the dozen heavily armed troops bearing down on us. There was only the creak of our own hull as we sailed on at one sixth the speed of our pursuers.
Pyt unlatched the locker in the stern, withdrew two single-shot rifles and cartridge bandoliers, and handed one to Alia.
Then both of them turned and stared at me.
Pyt pointed a three-fingered hand in my direction. “You brought these devils upon us. You get rid of them!”