B00BFVOGUI EBOK (9 page)

All through grad school, Jamie
Sturm had been plagued by the same nightmare. He was huddled on top of a
pedestal, trying to avoid the clawing fingernails of people down on the ground who were crawling all over each other to unseat him. Ashamed
of having a subconscious so embarrassingly on the nose, he’d never mentioned
the dream to his therapist. Financial industry work came in two flavors: paranoia
and panic. He’d known what was ahead.

Or so he thought. As faceless and
frightening as the people in his dreams were, at least they’d never had
tentacles for arms and drooling nozzles for mouths. The Baghu’s
slimy feelers slapped untiringly against the top edge of the fabricator. Twenty
minutes had passed and the creatures’ enthusiasm was unabated. Hunched atop the
big machine, Jamie kept his hand pressed on the panic button of his sales badge.
He’d already called out on the emergency channel and activated his suit’s
internal summons, but no one had seemed to notice.

“Welligan,
where
are
you?” Jamie yelled again
into his helmet mic.

Static.

The trader swore. He’d been
abandoned. Was this Welligan’s revenge for Jamie
ratting on him back at the depot? Or was the idiot simply incompetent? Jamie didn’t
know. But he knew he hadn’t heard anything from Bridget or any of the troopers
swept into the lagoon, either.

And they were supposed to be
protecting
him
?

On his hands and knees, Jamie
desperately looked around. He couldn’t see anything but the sea of tentacles; Baghu covered the entire beach. But he could still make out
the lagoon, and he knew the landing site was back in the other direction. There
weren’t as many Breathers on that side yet. Maybe he could make a jump for it
without being eaten or carried off himself.

Yeah,
that’s it
, he
thought. If the critters wanted the fabricator, maybe they’d ignore him. It was
his only shot. He stood—

“
Sturm!
”

Jamie pulled back from the edge
and yelled in response to the crackling voice over his headset. “Welligan! Dammit,
man!”

“Sorry, friend. We’re a little busy,” Welligan said.

Jamie thought he could hear the
sound of pulse blasts going off in the background of Hiro’s
transmission.
Well, at least someone’s
shooting.
“I need you to get busy over here,
friend!
”

“Can’t,” Welligan
said. “But I’m sending somebody. Sigma Three out.”

“Wait! What?”

Nothing.

Jamie dropped again to his knees
as a rumble shook the fabricator. Would the Baghu try
to carry the machine into the lagoon, too, ignorantly assuming it was a box
full of teddy bears? And what would happen to him then?

“Welligan!”
he yelled again. “Yang!”

“
Anyone!
”

Bridget Yang looked at the time
display projected on the inside of her faceplate. Thirty minutes. It felt like
longer — and it was far too long to be helpless.

The Baghu
who’d seized her had picked up speed as they plunged, carrying her down into
the darkness of the alien lake. Her armor had registered the increased pressure
and compensated; fortunately, the lagoon didn’t seem that deep. They’d touched
bottom after a little over a minute. She’d felt the creatures driving their
legs into the muck at the bottom, adhering to the lake bed floor.

She’d struggled during the first
few minutes, but she’d found it a futile effort. The Breathers’ tentacles were
wrapped around her in overlapping diagonal laces that tightened in response to
any movement. It was like being stuck in a giant Chinese finger trap. Only eye
movements, flexed fingertips, and spoken commands allowed her any control over
her armor’s internal functions at all.

There was no way to call up for
help. Traditional radio waves couldn’t penetrate the thick brine, and extremely
low frequency communications of the kind used by submarines were a one-way
affair from the land. Ginormous transmitters weren’t
part of the typical security squaddie’s kit.

But the liquid proved a fine
medium for ultrasound, and that was a capability her team’s armor had. Her
system’s transducer raised her voice above the range where humans could hear
and boomed her words straight through the Baghu tentacles
surrounding her. If the act caused the Breathers any discomfort, she couldn’t
tell — but anyone nearby with similar equipment would be able to hear and
decipher. She was a baby with a very noisy kick.

It only took a few minutes for
her to determine that her whole squad was similarly trapped in the immediate
vicinity. Some were still straining against the Baghu.
She’d ordered them to stop and lie limp. The liquid pressure wouldn’t crack the
HardSHELs, but she didn’t want to chance a test
between the aliens’ strength and their units’ servos. One buckled plate could
burst a seam, inviting disaster.

No, they needed to think on the
problem. And they certainly had the time. Her onboard fresherpak,
a bladder loaded with nanoids that drew on the
armor’s energy to mimic photosynthesis, would extend her suit’s oxygen for
quite some time. Power was the real limiting factor — and another reason not to
struggle.

“They’ve got to eat sometime,”
Bridget said.

“So do we,” called back Lopez-Herrera,
the squad medic.

Bridget knew as soon as she’d mentioned
food that it was a silly idea. Her suit’s live datalink
with the knowglobe was gone, but as a matter of
course she and her team had downloaded everything known about the species to
their personal systems. She’d reviewed it twice already — an impromptu study
session at the bottom of an alien lake — and now she reviewed it again, searching
the lines of text for anything helpful. Right now all she knew was that the Baghu could stay motionless down here indefinitely,
absorbing whatever it was they ate through their trunks.

“Maybe we burn,” Dinner said, referring to
their last-ditch defense used sometimes against the Spore. “That’d make them
let go.”

“Then we’d be statues at the
bottom of the lagoon,” Bridget countered. Besides, she wasn’t too sure how well
the suits would handle the pressure afterward — or any retaliation by the
Breathers.

More importantly, the act would
likely kill their captors, and there were rules about that sort of thing.
Lorraine’s report said that no Baghu had ever been
seen to act in a hostile manner before. There was a first time for everything,
and this was certainly it — but mindless Spores aside, Bridget didn’t cross
trillions of miles to kill aliens.

If she could
help it.

Bridget could hear O’Herlihy nonchalantly whistling a tune.
Just like him.
“Any
ideas, Mike?”

“Just that old Phippsy must be laughing his ass off right now,” he said.

And despite their circumstances, Bridget
laughed. Years earlier, O’Herlihy and a friend had “borrowed”
power armor units and carried a portable restroom to the top of Mount Everest.
It was an old prank, but what was new was the fact that Coach Phipps, a lecher
who’d harassed students for years, was welded inside. That, and a lifetime of other
rash acts of chivalry, had led to O’Herlihy’s unemployability outside Bridget’s team. “So how long did it
take for them to rescue Phipps?” she asked.

“Long enough for him to put the
box to its intended use a few times,” O’Herlihy
answered.

“We may wind up with the
opportunity ourselves. Just stay calm, everybody. We’ll come up with something.
And don’t forget — Hiro’s still out there.”

A collective groan echoed over
the ultrasound receiver. Bridget was half expecting that reaction, but she
couldn’t be heard to join in. Her verbal head count had determined that Welligan’s troops weren’t in the soup with her. Would he
have the sense to do what he was trained to do in this situation? She hoped so,
but she wasn’t much more confident than her fellow prisoners.

She chewed on her lip.
Think, woman. There’s got to be a way out!

“Hey, guys! Knock it off!” The
volume on Jamie’s external speakers was set at maximum now, and he could easily
hear his translated voice booming in the Baghu’s
language. But if they could hear him over the din of their own gabble, he
couldn’t tell. His interface with the knowglobe was
still live, but there was nothing new to translate in the Baghu
cacophony. Just the same “We trade, we trade, we
trade.” That was it. Talking to the Breathers was as useless as trying to talk
to his own crew.

All at once the aliens’ demeanor
changed. Instead of waving their tentacles toward him, they windmilled
their arms wildly. Squawks became shrieks, and the sea of Breathers around the
fabricator heaved. A blaze of light cascaded across the aliens. Jamie looked
up.

The
Indispensable
! The team’s Prospector-type shuttle was in the air, descending
through the billowing chlorine fog. Retro thrusters glowing, the massive vessel
swung low over the crowd of aliens. Some dove back into the lagoon, but others
simply ran in circles.

Its pilot evidently realizing the
crowd wasn’t going to disperse, the
Indispensable
moved in toward the fabricator instead. The door to one of the bangboxes that made up the shuttle opened. The ship
descended to a point in midair just meters above and to the side of his
metallic perch. For a moment, Jamie feared being roasted by the rockets — but instead
the ship stopped its turn in exact alignment with the edge of the fabricator.
It dipped gently, leaving a long leap between him and the hatchway.

“Come on over,” he heard Geena Madaki say in his headset.

“Lower and closer,” Jamie said.

“Not with those things on the
ground,” she said. “Jump for it!”

Jamie looked down. The Baghu were still there — and the arrival of the ship seemed
to have agitated the braver ones. Breathers were climbing over each other now,
clambering to reach him atop the device.

“Gah!”
Jamie said as a tentacle wrapped around his booted foot. He leapt into the air,
freeing himself from the creature. On touching down again, he made a bounding
leap for the ship.

Jamie reached out for the open
hatchway, even as Madaki chose that moment to bank
Indispensable
closer. Jamie’s chest
slammed against the bottom of the doorway, and his arms clawed for a handhold
inside the vehicle.

“I’ve got you!” said an occupant
from above. Lynn Stubek, one of the members of Welligan’s squad, locked onto his wrists. “Madaki, we’re clear!”

Jamie thought he heard the pilot
say something then, but his mind was in no position to process information.
Indispensable
lurched back over the mass
of Breathers and banked and rose, Jamie’s body still
hanging out of the vessel. He looked up at Stubek in
panic. But the woman had him tight in her servo-assisted grasp. Within seconds,
he was aboard — and panting for air on the floor of the shuttle.

“Welcome back,” Madaki called back from the pilot’s seat. “Seem to be
making a habit of hauling you away from trouble.”

Jamie looked at the monitor with
the feed from the shuttle’s underside. He thought the ground had vanished beneath
the fog for a moment, but on closer inspection he realized that what he was
looking at was a living carpet. It was as if the whole undersea population of Baghula had come up to see him off, both bobbing in the
lagoon and writhing on the beach.

Stubek helped him to Madaki’s side in the compartment. “Bridget’s team,” he
said, wheezing. “Pulled under—”

“Chief’s fine,” the dark-skinned
woman said. “I expect they’re all having a nice rest down there.” She looked
back at Jamie. “But our Hiro isn’t doing so well.
Check channel seven.”

Jamie had forgotten about Welligan. But he remembered quickly when he tuned his suit’s receiver — and heard frantic, confused
yelling and more of the blasts he’d heard before.

“That’s not good,” he said. His
eyes widened — and a thought occurred. Jamie didn’t want to be here: he’d made
that plain at every turn to anyone who’d listen. The security guys, meanwhile,
seemed to lap this stuff up — Bridget’s leaderly
reluctance notwithstanding. If Jamie hadn’t brought them here, they would have
been tussling with something somewhere. But Hiro Welligan hadn’t seemed like the typical muscle-brained
danger seeker. Was he here because he had to be, too?

Jamie looked again at the monitor
depicting the tsunami of Baghu. He gulped. “I guess
we should—”

“Already on my way,” Madaki said. She put
Indispensable
into a roll, heading back toward the original landing site.

Jamie took a deep breath. “Thanks
for the pickup, I guess.”

“It’s not personal.” The pilot smiled
primly. “You’ve got the badge.”

Like most expeditionary spacecraft
in the whirlibang era,
Indispensable
was a disappointment to model makers and others interested
in indexing the starships of the galaxy. It could look like darn near anything,
depending on the needs of the journey. While the current configuration linking
the two troop ’boxes, the “general store,” and the engine mount in a horizontal
chain was standard for most sales missions, the crew could attach practically
anything that came with them through the whirlibang.

In fact, Jamie had learned, the
only thing that gave the collection of shipping units its name was his presence.
Like an admiral transferring a flag, Jamie made any vessel he traded from
Indispensable
. It was a tough,
positive-sounding name, and he’d been pleased to get it: most of the other Quaestor trading ships followed the corporate policy of
reusing East India Company names, resulting in would-be professionals having to
call
Constant Friend
,
Happy Entrance
and
Trades Increase
home.

Then Bridget had told him why the
name had survived on the list so long, unclaimed: the eighteenth-century
Indispensable
was a convict ship charged
with carrying prisoners to Australia. That is, when it wasn’t engaged in stabbing
whales, a barbaric practice banned decades earlier. The name had been another
joke on him by the members of Surge Sigma — but he hadn’t objected. He’d felt
like a prisoner during the whole ordeal since Venus.

Now, however, he was one of the
few members of the crew who was free. And it had dawned on him that with Chief
Yang out of contact, he might just be in charge. So why was
Indispensable
racing back toward the
mass of crazy aliens?

“Slow down!” he yelled, clutching
the back of Madaki’s pilot seat. He couldn’t see the
Breathers through the fog below, but the ship’s sensors had picked up no fewer
than a thousand charging inland. They had engulfed
Indispensable
’s original landing site and were now pursuing Welligan’s team into the uplands. And the shuttle was
heading right back into the fight.

Looking out the forward viewport,
he could make out the mass of aliens on the move. His stomach started to crawl
up his throat. He could visualize how any landing might go: Baghu
swarming over the vessel, just as they had the fabricator. Thoughts of Welligan, of rescue, of
anything
,
fled from his mind. The blood drained from his face, and he felt his fingers
going numb. “Put…put us back over the lagoon,” he mumbled.

“What?” Concentrating, Madaki didn’t look back.

Now he found his voice. “Put us
back over the lagoon!” Jamie yelled.

“Calm down, Jamie,” Madaki said. “If you’re hyperventilating, your suit will
add CO
₂
. Just breathe.”

Jamie could only hear the creak
of the shuttle descending. “Bridgie’s
team. We get them back — they’ll deal with this!”

The pilot spoke in even tones. “We’re out of
contact with Bridgie’s team. I’ve got to make a decision.”

“I thought you said Yang’s squad
was fine!”

“I don’t think a bunch of slimies can kill my Bridget,” the older woman said. “But
I’ve got one squad under assault and another underwater. We save the one under
assault.”

Jamie sat down on the shuttle
floor as the ground below raced toward them. He tugged at his silly badge.
“Does this count for anything?”

“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling. “My
responsibility to you is to keep you clear of trouble, and I will.” She put the
vehicle into a steep decline.

Jamie cringed as
Indispensable
leveled off meters above
the surface and then turned its nose upward to match the slope of the hillside.
The shuttle was no helicopter or Coandăcar: it
was designed for short hops on-world, not aerobatics. Yet Madaki
was neatly following the contours of the land, not even grazing the snouts of
the ascending Baghu.

O’Herlihy had told him that Madaki was flying space missions before he was born: she,
at least, had seemed competent. But Jamie had to wonder how typical these sorts
of scrapes were if they needed an ace in the first place.

“
Finally!
” At the sound of Welligan’s voice in his headset, Jamie looked up The members of Surge Three — Welligan’s
squad within Bridget’s command — appeared as glowing figures on the shuttle’s
tactical display.

Behind Jamie, Stubek — still
in her space suit, as he was — headed to the port hatchway and opened it. She
looked back to Jamie. “Get by the other airlock!”

The notion of removing the metal
barrier between him and Baghula’s denizens didn’t
interest Jamie at all. But after a moment’s hasty reflection, he decided he’d
rather have the guys with the guns inside with him. Cycling the hatchway, he
looked down at the windswept plateau.

Clinging to the inside of the starboard
airlock’s external doorway, Jamie saw Welligan and
his other eight squad mates in a narrow circle facing outward and pointing
their rifles at the ground around them. Baghu were
charging up toward them, about to overrun their position.

“Ride’s here, people,” Welligan said, looking up at
Indispensable
and then back at the advancing wave of Breathers.
“We’re still on Regulation Three. Sonic bursts, ground sweep!”

At his command, the troopers
fired at the surface meters in front of them. Unseen energy jackhammered
against the ground sending wet dirt flying upward in clumps. The aliens skidded
to a stop, evidently startled. As a group, Welligan
and his companions began expanding their circle, clearing a Breather-free zone
large enough to admit the
Indispensable
.
The shuttle swung toward the surface. From her doorway, Stubek
fired sonic blasts from a large shipboard weapon over her fellow troopers’
heads. Her shots weren’t even moving dust at that range, but the sound kept the
Baghu from advancing as Welligan
and his team backed toward the ship.

Five surge team members entered the
airlock on Stubek’s side, and Jamie helped three
aboard on his. Welligan was the last to take Jamie’s
hand up. “I told you I’d send somebody.” The soldier smiled, but his spectral
hair was now white.

“Uh-huh.” Jamie didn’t even think
about the headcount and slammed the hatch closed. Before it finished cycling,
Jamie felt
Indispensable
lurch
heavenward.

“Take us to sea,” Welligan called out to Madaki.
Then he looked at Jamie and exhaled. “Enjoying your trip so far?”

Jamie gestured toward Welligan’s rifle. “What was that sonic business down there?
You guys have tougher settings — I expected to see bodies everywhere!”

“It’s Quaestor’s
general orders for expedition security,” Welligan
said, undoing his helmet. “Regulation Three:
Don’t kill the customers!
”

Jamie sputtered. “These guys
aren’t customers! They’re trying to drown us!”

“It happens. I take it you’ve
never made cold calls before?”

“This is crazy,” Dinner said in
Bridget’s ear. “I’m willing to let them have the armor and swim for it.”

Bridget chuckled. True, Arbutus
was a world-class swimmer — but that method of escape required getting free to
start with. And they all knew that the brine wasn’t that hospitable — nor was the
air breathable once you got out of the lagoon.

Which made
Bridget think of something.
She was in intimate contact with the Baghu, after
all, with the tentacles smashed against her helmet. She’d noted the residue from
the leader’s “handshake” with Jamie earlier; now, her visual and spectrographic
sensors could get a really close look. And she really had nothing better to do
other than watch her armor’s power and oxygen waste away.

“Huh,” she said, looking at the
readout. There were concentrations she wasn’t expecting. She struggled to
remember her alien biochemistry lessons.

She was working her way through
an onboard tutorial when she heard a faint whisper, not from any of the other
prisoners. For a moment, she thought the Baghu had
said something. But then it grew louder and clearer.

“Yeah, I heard it,” Bridget said into the transducer.
An extremely faint ultrasound signal was coming from somewhere above. A few
minutes of adjustments on her part improved the signal. A buoy had been dropped
into the lagoon above them, trailing a heavy sensor pack on a cable. Her team
was out of contact no longer:
Indispensable
still existed.

“…okay down there?” Bridget could
barely make out Madaki’s voice.

“Just bumming around on the beach,”
Bridget replied. “Well, under the beach — and a ways out.” The colleagues quickly
compared notes on the situation topside and below. “How’s the team?” Bridget
asked.

“All secure, dear,” Madaki said. “As is your trader.”

“Hello,” Bridget heard Jamie say.

“Hello.”
Why does he have to be the one loud and clear?

“This isn’t my fault,” Jamie
said.

“Now, why would you think I would
think that? No, I’ve always wanted to spend the day at the bottom of a lake
getting hugged by aliens. Thank you.”

A pause. “You’re welcome.”

Bridget would’ve given anything
for enough range of motion to put her head in her hands. “Put Welligan on,” she said.

Hiro recounted the evacuation for
Bridget. They hadn’t harmed any Baghu, but he didn’t
see how they’d be able to avoid doing so if they needed to forcibly enter the
lagoon. “There’s a good line of them six or eight deep on the shore — and more
bobbing in the water. We were lucky we didn’t clock one when we dropped the
buoy.”

“We’ve got a couple of hours’
margin here,” Bridget said. “See what the Sheoruk
think. They’re back at their camp, I’d bet. Maybe they know something about how
the Baghu are acting. Maybe there was some etiquette
we blew — something we did to set them off.”

“And then?” Welligan
asked. “I mean, what if that doesn’t work?”

“Then you extract us however you
have to. Just don’t let them get close to you with those tentacles.”

“Only one way
to prevent that.”

“I know,” Bridget said somberly.
“Surge One out.” Then, having had a thought, she signed back on for a postscript.
“And don’t let Jamie piss off Lorraine again!”