“In a few minutes,” said Theodore. “I’m kind of curious as to what’s got inside that ship.”
“Main air-lock outer door is open,” confirmed Vinnie, as they drew closer. She slipped over the side of the sled into the waist-deep water, heat-beam in her hand. Kelvin followed suit, and a moment later, so did Mazith. “Not good.”
“Nope,” agreed Theodore.
He snapped the reins, and the frogs turned quickly, pulling the sled into position for a quick getaway. But he didn’t leave.
Kelvin looked around. Here in the center, the fog settled like it usually did, but it was thin and he could see at least fifty meters. There was no visible threat, nothing was coming out of the air-lock door, nothing moving around the ship.
“Is Jat around?” he whispered to Vinnie. “Because I don’t particularly fancy going in there myself.”
“Wimp,” said Vinnie. “She’s here. Don’t know how close.”
“Maybe I could contact Jezeth,” said Mazith eagerly.
“No!” Kelvin and Vinnie spoke together. “No contact with anyone, OK?”
“So what are you going to do?” asked Theodore with interest, from several meters back.
“We have to go in,” said Kelvin. “Time’s getting away.”
“Someone’s coming out!” exclaimed Mazith, pointing. “It’s one of the other triplets, not dead after all!”
She started to wade forward as a figure appeared in the air-lock door. A teenaged boy in a bright gold-and-black civilian flight suit, without a helmet. He stood in the air lock and waved one arm jerkily.
“Stay back,” ordered Vinnie. “Lieutenant Mazith! Halt!”
Mazith didn’t obey. She thrashed vigorously through the water toward the open air lock, calling out, “Hey!”
Vinnie cursed and dashed after her, reaching out to pull her back by the harness of her Terran Navy webbing belt. But it broke, the fabric having rotted away in just the few days of exposure. Mazith floundered on.
In the air lock, the man waved again but he also rose up, feet dangling, a huge pink spore mass suddenly visible behind him. Fungal creepers ran beneath the man’s feet and splashed out into the water, racing toward Mazith with frightening speed.
Kelvin and Vinnie fired together, heat-beams sizzling over Mazith’s head as they targeted the spore body in the air lock and its human puppet. But unlike most Venusian fungi the thing didn’t burst into flames. The pencil-thin beams just drilled smoking, blackened holes and more and more spore creepers kept spewing from it, the leading ones rushing toward the frantically reversing Mazith.
She only made it a few meters back before they latched on to her, drilling through lizard-skin and artificial fibers and straight through skin, following blood vessels and nerves and muscles, holding her upright as she screamed. Then she stopped screaming, and her arms lifted up and down, as if the fungus was testing its control of its new puppet.
“Back and sweep,” ordered Vinnie tersely, firing in broad arcs across the water only ten meters ahead, trying to stop the creepers. Kelvin followed suit, backing and shooting and swearing, but the creepers were going wide and there were so many of them, dozens and dozens of tendrils that would encircle them both in a matter of seconds, and Theodore and the frogsled too—
Something erupted from the water just behind Kelvin. He began to turn, and it smashed into him and pushed him deep underwater. Panicking, he reached up to claw his way to the surface—and everything above went white, the white of utmost brilliance that marked the detonation of a tactical plasma grenade.
Even facedown under a meter of dirty water and wearing goggles, Kelvin was blinded for a few seconds. He thrashed and fought in dark fear as something dragged him out of the water, till he realized it was a human hand and not fungal tendrils about to bore into his flesh.
“Brace your feet!”
Kelvin dug his feet in and leaned back as water rushed around him. His vision cleared, apart from some dancing spots of darkness. He briefly saw a deep, smoking crater between himself and the Jumping Jehosophat, before it was once again filled as the waters rushed back in. Theodore was whipping his frogs into a frenzy of paddling and jumping to keep the sled from being sucked back, while Vinnie was bulling her way against the current toward him and the woman who was still holding him up.
“A hit, a very palpable hit,” muttered Kelvin, shivering. Not from cold, for it was as warm as ever, the water still steaming and boiling twenty meters away, the final aftereffects of the grenade.
There was nothing left of Lieutenant Mazith and the fungus tendrils. She might never have existed at all.
“Never seen anything like that puppeteer,” said Jat, slotting the snout of the Mark XXII Plasma Grenade projector over her back into its harness, the whine of its protective shield generator slowly fading as the weapon went into standby mode. She was an Oscar Goodson clone, small and wiry, and apart from the grenade-launcher harness and several other weapons, she wore only a kind of lizard-skin swimsuit, and the rest of her body, face and hairless scalp included, was covered in swamp lichen grown in a splinter pattern mimicking ASAP Terran equatorial jungle camouflage. A particularly large frog paddled placidly in a circle behind her, trailing a rig rather like the travois of the Plains Indians of Earth. “You reckon there’s more inside?”
Kelvin spat out some water, rinsed his goggles, and took a look at the air lock. The plasma blast had scoured out the air lock and the fungal mass that he’d seen there, doubtless along with all the electronics and who knew what else. They’d be lucky if they could get it to close manually now. But he wasn’t particularly worried about that. The thought of more puppeteer fungus was of much more immediate concern.
“Probably not,” called out Theodore. “I’ve seen them puppeteers before. Single spore body always, no groups or clusters. They always keep one life-form to use as a decoy and absorb the rest. Interesting fellers.”
“ ‘Probably not’ doesn’t sound all that convincing,” said Kelvin. He looked at his watch. “Forty-eight minutes.”
“Shit,” said Vinnie, raising her heat-beam. Kelvin’s head flashed up. There was another jerking, twisting figure in the air lock, another puppet raised by the bright pink threads of the fungus behind it.
“Turn and brace!” ordered Jat tersely, unlimbering the launcher. Kelvin felt a crawling sensation across his skin as the force shield extended outward. He had already spun about and was hunching down, with his eyes closed, when the second grenade went off.
A minute later he was blinking and hopping backward to avoid a stream of very hot water that had rushed past as the shield came down. The launcher’s power pack could only maintain the shield for two or three seconds, to protect a squad from the initial blast. It wasn’t designed for the aftereffects of detonation close to water.
The yacht’s air lock was now definitely out of operation, the outer door hanging at a slight angle, scorch marks and pockmarks of melted alloy visible on the inside.
“So what are the chances of there being more than two?” asked Jat.
Vinnie shrugged and looked at Kelvin.
“Too risky to go in,” she said. “We’d better hightail it out of here with Theodore.”
“I guess so,” said Kelvin heavily. He looked up at the clouds above, visualizing the sky beyond and the missiles that would be streaking in sometime in the next thirty-eight minutes or thereabouts. “What about if I go in? The ship’s been venerified; they’ll have a deluge system of antifungals operated from the bridge.”
“You’d have to get to the bridge, and you know most of those antifungals aren’t worth shit for the stuff out here,” said Vinnie.