Twenty-two
Pyt steered our boat into a passage darkened by hundred-foot-high rock walls that narrowed upward to a slit. The channel was too open to be a cave, too narrow to be a fjord, too broad to be a crevasse.
Boom.
A swell tossed the boat against the cliff and knocked me off balance. I tripped over coiled rope, fell headlong against a bait barrel, and landed on the still-twitching rhizodont. It managed a slow snap at me, and I kicked its head. I grabbed at Alia’s arm to stand and knocked her down, too.
She pulled herself upright, gasping.
Alia furled the sails as the swells swept the boat down the passage, thumping against rock hard enough to crack our hull’s planking. She unlashed a wooden pole, three times her height, from the mast, then stood in the bow, using the pole to fend the boat off the cliffs.
I called back to Pyt, “What do you want me to do?”
He waved a hand, palm down. “Sit down! Shut up! We’ve done this a thousand times.”
Ten minutes later the passage widened and the swells spilled out into the unconfined area and dissipated. Our boat slowed with the current, and I looked back up the passage, half expecting to see the skimmer bearing down.
Alia aimed her fending pole into the water, then walked from bow to stern pushing the pole against the bottom, speeding the boat through the widened grotto.
Fifty yards ahead, the grotto channel split into three more passages. Pyt steered us into the leftmost channel.
I turned back to him. “What if they follow one of the other channels?”
He smiled. “That’s the beauty of the Inside Passage. The falls at the end of either of those channels will crush a Tressen launch like an egg.”
The Inside Passage referred to what the xenogeologists called an inundated tectonic compression zone. That was an expensive description of the place where a continent and a seabed pressed against one another, butting heads until one yielded to the other. However, in this case, both landmasses had pushed back, stubborn and unyielding.
Like, shall we say, a Trueborn senior case officer with an idealistic board up her adorable ass, and a reasonable but pragmatic, some would say nihilistically cynical, junior case officer.
Like the hypothetical case officers, the landmasses had finally buckled and shattered, one worse than the other. The resultant jumble of cliffs, drowned canyons, channels, rapids, and falls created a sheltered inland waterway that stretched along the shore of half a continent. The Inland Passage had connected and defined the Iridian nation for centuries.
Pyt knew his world. But he didn’t know any others.
I walked back and stood alongside him to answer his question. “Remember, that thing can do things a Tressen launch can’t.”
“I saw that thing. It’s too large, too heavy. If they choose the wrong passage, it won’t survive either of those falls. So two chances in three we’re done with them.”
I shook my head. “They won’t choose wrong. The skimmer’s got sensors that detect heat and motion residues. Even micro rippling left behind in water. It’s a mechanical bloodhound.”
Pyt crossed his arms and just stared at me. Bloodhounds wouldn’t evolve on Tressel for eons. He frowned, then nodded. “I understand. You’re saying they can track us. What do you suggest?”
I sucked in a breath. A case officer who was building local relationships was taught that the first request for advice or aid was a golden opportunity. If the case officer offered good ideas or useful materiel, a bond formed. If he blundered, the opportunity transmuted from gold to lead, and the locals wrote him off as worthless.
Worse, this problem wasn’t, for example, a child’s toothache that I could cure from the meds kit. If I couldn’t think of something, we would find ourselves in a twelve-on-three firefight with a dozen trained killers.
I rummaged through the jumbled gear in the tiny boat, searching more for an idea than an object, while Alia stared at me. I tried to look like I had a clue.