''Addie, I got a sinker out here near the landing run. It's marked. You better come get it.''
''Spotted your flare already,'' a woman's voice came back. ''We're under way. You in trouble?''
''Maybe. I think we dinged our prop. I may need a tow.''
''Can do two as well as one.''
Kris was not ready to go back. She dropped her bailing bucket and headed for the control station. ''You think you can do better?'' Jose said, his face a mixture of macho defiance and rank embarrassment.
''Maybe I can,'' Kris said, punching the keypad opposite the wheel. The small view screen came to life. ''On the Typhoon, my job is controlling what the liquid metal does in battle. There's got to be a way to make this metal repair itself.''
''You think so?''
''Don't know until I've tried.'' The view screen was small, and the keypad just numeric; Kris found herself keying through a complex series of option screens, diving deeper and deeper into some kind of tree. It didn't help that the screens had been written by someone for whom English was a very foreign language.
''You aren't going to dump us in the water, are you?'' Tom asked. Kris took the question for serious, particularly after the nods his comment got from long Nabil and big Olaf.
''I'll try not to, but you might want to tighten your life vests. Never can tell what a spacer will do, out on deep water.''
''Very funny.'' Tom didn't laugh. ''She gets it wrong in space, we're breathing vacuum,'' he pointed out. But Olaf gave his vest harness a good pull, and Nabil eyed the waves around them dolefully. Kris found something that claimed to be propulsion repair, located her dory, then Water Screw, which she took for prop, and hit Repair. The screen blinked, then went blank.
''Did that fix it?'' Jose asked.
''Try it,'' Kris answered, not at all sure.
Jose eased the throttle up; the boat took on way. ''Feels right,'' he said. ''Yeah! Think you can take the dents out of the bow?'' He pointed forward where the metal was pushed in.
''I'll try…when we're on dry land,'' Kris agreed. That got a laugh from captain and crew. Jose brought the boat up to something less than its full speed, posted two lookouts with long poles forward, and ordered the rest back to bailing. He motioned Kris to the command station.
''You have a map of the bay?'' Kris pulled out her reader, brought up the latest picture of the sprawling inlet, then overlaid a map from pre-disaster. ''Will that help?''
''Yeah. There's a swamp over there with three rivers feeding in and a dozen ways out. Now they're all just one big mess. We could be quite a ways up the wrong one before we knew it.''
Kris tapped the Global Positioning Satellite button, and a plus appeared on the screen.
''You have one of those, too. I had to hock mine.''
''This will work,'' Kris assured him, gave him the unit, and went back to bailing. She didn't have to ask when they hit the river. Even with Jose putting the engine back to full power, they slowed down. Bare tree trunks stood starkly out of the water, marking where the shore had been. Even after this planet dried out, it would need a lot to recover.
Kris stood, stretched her back, and turned to Jose. ''Will we stay to the center of the river?''
''Not if we want to get there before next week. Current out there is a good six, maybe eight knots. We stay away from that. Course, hitting trees is very bad. Nabil, Akuba up front, keep your eyes open. We don't want to wrap the woman's boat around a tree or rock.'' The rain picked that moment to get thicker, and visibility dropped to hardly a boat length. Jose cut back on the throttle a little, and their headway fell to almost nothing.
Progress was slow as the lookouts on the bow poled them away from rocks, shrubs, the odd building, and tree after tree. Kris glanced a few times at the main channel, but there was no going there. Maybe it had once been as placid as her lake back home. Now the water fought itself, roiling up, then crashing down in a shower of white water. Water gone mad with the power to turn trees to matchsticks and rocks to gravel. As dangerous as it was along the flooded bank, the main stream was suicide.
Progress upriver was slow, punctuated with terror. Poling them off a tree, a stray current grabbed them, sending them downriver sideways and slamming them into a rock they'd just passed so carefully. Even big Olaf needed help pushing off. All hands applied poles, oars, and hands to the rock, only to unbalance the boat. Water poured in over the dented gunwale.
''Navy to port, the other side, left,'' Jose yelled as Tom went right. Kris fought her way hand over hand up the cargo lashings to hang as far over the left side as she dared, raising the bent but unpierced right side. Nabil and Akuba pushed the boat's nose off, and Jose let the current carry them downstream a hundred meters while he made sure all was well before putting the engine back in gear and renewing the fight with the wild river.
Kris glanced at her watch; they'd be doing good to make the Anderson Ranch before dark at this rate. She considered calling the Colonel but dropped the idea. She was committed; he could hang her for mutiny or insubordination later. There was little he could do now. Kris concentrated on riding the river.
The rain came down in sheets. Tommy suggested they look for pillowcases to match. Mick answered he was ready for bed, with or without sheets. Which raised the question from Olaf as to who would share a bed with whom. Tired and wet, they could still laugh. If she had to ride a river gone mad, this was the crew to do it with.
As hours went by, Kris grew wet and cold. Her muscles ached in places she hadn't known she had. She couldn't just ride this boat but had to work every moment to keep from being bashed against the liquid metal sides or slammed into the crates of food, maybe shattering the glass vials of vaccine. So Kris stayed on her feet, stooping over to bail, flexing her knees as the boat rose up to slap her or dropped out from underneath her. This was nothing like the cruise she and Tommy shared on the Oasis. Would she ever want to be on a body of water bigger than a Jacuzzi again?
''That's the Harmosa place,'' Jose called to Kris, pointing at a rooftop between them and the roiling river. ''Andersons are next, about three miles farther upriver. Everything is going fine.''
As the captain said that, they rounded a bend in the river. Out of nowhere, an eddy from the main channel caught them. Jose held on to the wheel with both hands, his legs wrapped around the wheel post, fighting the swirling current. The boat whirled as it rose and fell; the worst bucking they'd had all day. Tommy lost his hold and was half overboard before Kris got a hand on his belt. The next pitch and drop would have thrown them both over the side if Mick hadn't gotten a hand on them, his feet entwined in the cargo lashings. Finally, Olaf managed to make his way across the cargo. He grabbed Tommy and Kris by their packs with his big paws and tossed them into the bottom of the boat like they were kittens.
Kris lay on her belly for a long minute, gasping for breath, letting the rain pour down on her, the sloshing water soak into her. She had really gotten herself and Tommy into a mess this time. It was almost over. Just a bit more, she told herself as she struggled to her feet, both hands wrapped around cargo lashings and a leg through a third to boot.
''Thanks, Kris,'' Tommy said.
''Thanks to all of you,'' Kris added peering at each of her crew through the gathering darkness.
''We thank you.'' Jose laughed. ''Think of the stories we will tell when we get back.'' Olaf and Mick seemed to like that. Nabil just shook his head. Akuba never looked up from his place on the bow, looking for snags.
Now it was getting seriously dark. A glance at her wrist told Kris this was a lot earlier than it should have been. Part of the gloom was the incessant downpour. But they were also in the shadows of the cliffs rising a good 300 meters high on the south side of the gorge the river ran through. ''There's rapids three, four miles past the Anderson place,'' Jose called to all hands. ''Let's keep our eyes open, crew. We'll be in a mess if we go too far.''