“How did she know to do that?” asked Kelvin. “I thought the Navy picked you up in town? And besides, since when has Jat done anything anyone asked her to?”
“The Navy did pick me up in town,” said Vinnie. “We’ve got a landline here now, at least for the dry season. I called and told Jat about the mission, and asked her to ask Osgood to go to the Lepers while she stayed back to look after the ranch.”
“Smart,” said Kelvin.
“Nah, she knew what I was doing. It just gave her an excuse to say no to my request, then do what I wanted while pretending not to.”
“You guys have a very complicated relationship.”
“And you don’t?”
“Uh, I don’t suppose there is any chance of a shower, sir?” asked Mazith. Her formerly nicely pressed camo uniform was looking quite bedraggled now, and was splashed with mud and speckled with multicolored spores.
“Through there,” said Vinnie. “It’ll be the last one for a while. Scrub off all your lotion, let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll apply the lichen. It’ll need overnight to get established. Kel, you can use the decon shower. You want to apply your own lichen? There’s a pot there.”
“Yeah, yeah,” grumbled Kelvin. “Can I borrow some clothes?”
“Help yourself,” said Vinnie. “I’ll see if they left us anything ready for dinner.”
They had, and after lizard steaks with breadfungus and several classic martinis, Kelvin felt considerably better than he had, despite the creeping sensation of the lichen spreading along his arms and legs, around his groin and armpits, and across his face. In a fit of whimsy, he’d applied antifungal ointment to constrain the lichen in tiger stripes, with some whiskers out either side of his nose. It was already coming into effect, judging from the sidelong glances from Mazith. Her facial lichen matched Vinnie’s spirals and she had adopted a lizard-skin singlet while retaining her camo trousers, all of it indicating an effort to fit in.
“Time you hit the hay, Lieutenant,” said Vinnie, when the clearing up was done. “We’ll be getting up at first light. Bunkhouse through the red door, take any bunk. See you in the morning.”
As soon as she’d left, Vinnie checked that the door was firmly shut before the clone siblings made each other another drink. Martini for Kelvin, and a local Venusian whisky for Vinnie.
“So what did smooth Captain O’Kazanis not tell us?” asked Kelvin. “And what’s Lieutenant Mazith lying about?”
“It could be just the kids are that important,” replied Vinnie. She paused and added thoughtfully, “If there are any kids …”
“Yeah,” said Kelvin. “A bunch of veep maggots take off by themselves? Sounds pretty thin to me. What happened to their bodyguards, conducting officers, babysitters …”
“I don’t get sending Mazith with us, either,” said Vinnie. “Why do we need instant comms? And how do we even know she is a special communicator?”
“You think she might not be?”
“I dunno. There’s something not right …”
“She’s definitely lying about something to do with the special communication,” said Kelvin.
“Yeah,” mused Vinnie. “Got to wonder why they’re using us, too, our megaskills notwithstanding. Pretty deniable, couple of old-timers from a pre–World Gov Navy.”
“Maybe the Navy wanted that yacht crashed and whatever indication they’ve got that it didn’t crash is bad news,” said Kelvin. “Negative kill. So they have to send an operator to make sure, only its being where it is, they need local help.”
“You got a suspicious mind, brother.”
“Could be, could be something else again,” said Kelvin. He scratched his head, frowned, and carefully inspected his fingernail. Itches on Venus were not to be ignored. “I figure whatever it is, it’ll come clear enough when we get close to the yacht.”
“I’ll have a word with Jat when we catch up with her,” said Vinnie. “Get her to watch over us, hey?”
“Will she do it?” asked Kelvin.
Vinnie gave him the look that had quelled many a junior officer and NCO.
“You ride the rear saddle tomorrow, too. Keep an eye on our young looie.”
It was raining when they set out the next day, warm rain that came down in sudden, smothering deluges that lasted a few minutes before easing off, only to deliver another barrage ten or fifteen minutes later. Within a few hours, they were into the Swamp proper, and finding a way with ground solid enough and water not too deep for the lizard became a full-time task for Vinnie, even with the tall bronze way markers that had been hammered deep into the soft ground to show the path to the Lepers’ territory.
Only a few kilometers into the Swamp, the treelike green caps gave way to a profusion of clusters of smaller fungi, in many different colors, some of them mobile. There were also rabbit-sized lizard-things, and insectoid critters that swam and jumped and chattered, and early on the afternoon of the first day, something shadowy and huge loomed ahead in the fog. Vinnie backed the lizard off and all three of them readied their heat-beams before it continued on its way. There were only two known Venusian life-forms that big. One was a truly monstrous lizard and the other the Devil’s Tower, an ambulatory fungoid terror with fruiting spore-arms six meters long.
Two sweaty, itchy days later—broken by two long, hot nights spent on too-small islands that, while not actually underwater, were astonishingly damp—they came to what Vinnie described as the “Leper Trading Post,” a massive, cube-shaped pink fungus at least fifteen meters a side, that had either naturally solidified into something approaching concrete or been somehow encouraged to, with windows and doors and rooms excavated out of it as if it were a small, rocky hill.
“There’s nearly always a Leper here,” said Vinnie. “There’d better be. I can’t navigate us any farther into the swamp.”
“They live inside that fungus cube?” asked Mazith. She pointed to the top corner, where the fog was swirling and discolored, a strain of grey through its normal bilious green. “And is that smoke?”
“Yeah, they use fires for drying out, cooking, and so on,” said Vinnie. “Some of those dark purple, kind of chicken-shaped fungi burn slow, they’re good fuel. Smoke is good, it means someone’s home. Come on, let’s go say hello. Remember, they can look a bit … confronting. Keep your hand off your heat-beam.”
The Leper who came to the front door was extremely confronting. Kelvin considered Vinnie’s advice to keep his hand off his heat-beam very wise, for if he’d seen the Leper out in the swamp, he would have burned first and investigated afterward.
Still roughly human-shaped, with two arms and two legs, the Leper wore no clothes and was instead clad in outgrowths of different-colored and -textured fungus from its body. It—for it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman—had a hard, bulbous carapace over its chest and back, extending down to its thighs, and rippled, corded growths along its arms and legs. Its feet were now more like flippers, the big toes still visible, the other toes buried beneath layers of a rubbery, bright yellow fungus reminiscent of duck feet.
Its head was almost entirely encased in a fuzzy ball of many thousands of black filaments, which were in constant motion. Only its face was free of this growth, and even then only around the eyes, nostrils and a narrowed mouth, lips replaced by puffy orange growths.
“Howdy,” said the Leper, the depth and timbre of his voice indicating that he was probably male. Or had been male before his fungal transformation, which presumably went well beyond the visible indications. He raised his hand, which had only three fingers and a kind of wound-up sprung tendril in place of the pinkie.
“Afternoon,” said Vinnie. “I’m Vinnie, and this is my brother Kelvin, and an associate, Mazith. Maybe you heard about us coming through from Jat?”