chapter TWENTY-FIVE
The slideway rose and fell like a tank racing over broken ground. Danny Pritchard had only a plastic bucket and not the hundred-odd tons of tank armor between him and danger, however.
The sea lifted and ebbed beneath him at no fixed period; or rather, at a period set by as many variables as a sun-spot sequence, theoretically calculable but for human practice lost in uncertainty. The water was a lucent gray-green, metallic. In it moved blurs of other colors, jetsam sucked from the current to be filtered and compacted by type in the tubes running back to the building on the shore.
The concentration of microlife and the leakage of juices from the processing drew larger beasts upstream. They could be seen playing as black shadows about the tubing—two meters long, three meters; one of them five meters at least, Danny would swear. It looked as slippery as a flame and as ravenous. No danger to the filter lines, perhaps; but sure death to any landsman who slipped from the bucket into the water.
Don Slade looked up, mildly startled as the bucket slid to a halt at his guard station. The rails and the catwalk supporting them stretched further out to the posts manned by Chesson and Leaf. Each of the men were responsible for five hundred meters of line. Slade had been bending over the rail. He held a rocket gun in his right hand as if it were a giant pistol. In Slade’s left, when he straightened so that it could be seen, was a length of twelve-centimeter tubing. He had been prodding it down into the water.
“Hey, snake,” Slade called cheerfully. “Come watch me improve my technique.” The tanker bent over the rail again.
Pritchard walked carefully to the bigger man. The filter lines, with the platforms and slideway above them, did not attempt to remain rigid in the sea. Strong as the lines were, the sea was stronger. If the apparatus did not give and flow with the moods of the water, the water would smash it with the casual ease of a vandal with a shop window. Knowing the necessity for flexibility did not prevent the motion from making Danny Pritchard queasy. “All right, trooper,” the Adjutant said as he joined Slade at the rail. “What’ve you got—Via!”
The thing that twisted up through the water had a long nose-spike and ragged teeth the color of blood. Like a trap slamming, it struck the tube Slade used as a lure. The tube sprang upward. It was almost wrenched from Slade’s grip. At the surface of the water, refraction bent the white tubing sharply. A meter below that hinge, the jaws were grinding the tough plastic into drifting motes.
Slade fired. When the shell struck it the sea fountained, reaching for the gun muzzle with lambent clarity. Then the water boiled red as the charge blew apart the carnivore’s head. The nose-spike and part of the upper jaw lifted from the explosion, then splashed back into the water.
The creature’s body began to drift, still writhing, beneath the filter line. Part of the cloud of blood preceding the carcass had been sucked into the line already with the plankton.
Slade pulled up his ragged-ended lure. “You see,” he said, “I know where the end of the tube is.” He tapped the plastic with the muzzle of his gun. “So I shoot for that, where I feel the tube is, and that teaches me how much to hold off when there’s only what I can see the next time.”
“They hit on this?” Danny asked, tapping the white plastic. He had expected the tube to have a soft, greasy feel, but it rang like steel beneath his fingernail. This was pressure tubing for repairs to the compaction segment.
“They do when I wire some meat onto it,” the tanker said with a grin. “Hungry as some of those beggars act, they might anyway. Shows you what greed gets you.
“And—” his face cooled—“that brings us to the question of Bev Dyson, doesn’t it? If they say anything as bad about him at the House as they do down here, then I regret nobody called me home before. I started a job near thirty years ago with a wrench, and it sounded like it’s past time to finish it.”
Pritchard stretched. He laced his fingers behind his back and lifted his arms as high as he could. With his eyes closed against the hugeness of the sea, the lift and fall of the platform was even soothing. “I’m the honored visitor touring the estate,” he said while still bent forward. “Your sister-in-law loaned me a car.” Pritchard straightened and looked at his big friend squarely. “Tough lady, but she needs help. What she doesn’t need is you barging in and getting your ass blown away, snake.”
“I said you were in charge, Danny,” Slade said mildly. The big man scanned the sensor read-outs on his board. One of them was flickering orange, a beast rippling to and from a distant portion of filter line, nothing to be concerned about as yet. Slade’s fingers pulled a rocket from a bandolier loop and slid it into the loading gate of the weapon. “Tell me what you think needs doing, and I’ll see about getting it done.”
“There’s a Council meeting in two days,” said Pritchard. “They’re gathering in person at the House, the whole Council. Going to decide on the guardianship of your nephew Teddy.”
“Council’s in Dyson’s pocket,” Slade said without emotion. He nodded toward the station, though two of the men were actually downline of Slade’s post. “What the crew here says is just what I saw myself. The Port’s supposed to be neutral ground. Dyson put his own men in and my brother—”
Slade’s big hand squeezed fiercely on the alloy barrel of his gun—”let him do it, the. . . . Well. So now they’re all afraid to burp for fear their cargo’ll get looted or deep-sixed, inbound and out both. He’s got the votes he needs, just like he did on that stupid business of me being the real heir. Cop!”
Danny looked at the bigger man sharply. “You could be, you know,” Pritchard said. “Marilee swears that your brother told her that the night your father died. That your father had whispered it to him, just at the end.”
“And I swear, my friend,” replied Don Slade, “that it’s cop even if it’s true. Look, what do seventeen minutes one way or the other matter, for running this, running Tethys—that’s what we Slades have done for six generations, Council be damned. You think if I’d really wanted it, that I’d have let a few minutes stand in the way? Blood and Martyrs, snake, you know me better than that!”
Pritchard laughed. “Well, you were younger, then,” he said.
Slade grinned back. “Yeah, and meaner’n a knife-jaw, my friend. Via, remember that bar on Emporion? The bouncer thought I was just blowing air till my tank came through the wall!”
Both men laughed and linked arms. “Well,” said Pritchard, “let’s say you rode in to the House on a supply truck tomorrow. I’ve seen what you looked like before you left Tethys: hair to your belt. I’m willing to bet that without that and the beard, maybe a little dye and editing, there’s nobody you’ll see who’s going to recognize you this long after. Not if you got through the Port. Now, there’s likely to be a problem in the yard itself, but I think . . .”
Danny Pritchard continued to talk in a calm, professional voice while the big man beside him nodded. Overhead, fairy skimmers folded their gossamer wings and dived into the rich sea life around the platform.
Slade simply noted their delicate motions. He knew that he could handle moving targets without any need to practice on these.