“I’ll go have a look,” said Theodore. He got off his sled and started to wade ahead toward the ship. He didn’t bother drawing his heat-beam.
“Hey!” called out Vinnie. “Wait up!”
“Lot of the local fungi leave me alone,” called out Theodore. “I’ll have a look around. If I’m not back in five minutes, help yourself to the sled.”
He gingerly tested the half-melted lip of the air lock but it had already cooled enough, so he hauled himself aboard, disappearing inside.
“I fucking hate Venus sometimes,” said Kelvin.
“It is what it is,” replied Jat with a shrug. “You got to admit, it’s an improvement on Mars.”
“Anything is an improvement on Mars,” said Kelvin. He looked at his watch again. “Anyone know the exact kill radius of whatever Terran Navy uses for tac nukes these days?”
“Got to be five kays each warhead, and they’ll overlap a bunch,” said Jat. “Also, the Roar will deflect them some, so the spread will be uneven. We could get lucky.”
“I haven’t noticed a lot of luck in the last little while,” said Kelvin.
“So we’re due some,” said Vinnie. “Quit with the whining.”
“I wasn’t whining,” protested Kelvin. “Just pointing out a fact.”
“Movement,” said Jat, raising the grenade launcher. “I only got one shot left with this, by the way.”
“It’s Theodore …” said Kelvin. The Leper appeared in the air lock, but there was something strange … he was holding up a bluish figure that might be another differently colored puppeteer or something equally dangerous …
“Hold your fire till my command,” ordered Vinnie tersely.
“It’s all clear!” called out the Leper. “A few minor things growing here and there, nothing serious.”
He lifted the blue-encrusted shape, which moved of its own accord a little, revealing a head and limbs.
“This is Jezeth! The triplet, Mazith’s ‘little sister,’ ” he called. “She escaped the puppeteer but has what we call the blue blanket. I’ll have to take her with me, she’ll die under any Terran treatment.”
“I thought Lepers had to volunteer!” called out Vinnie.
Theodore gave his strange, rippling shrug.
“You could say she has,” he said. “The blue blanket hasn’t killed her, and she’ll come back to consciousness and a good life in time, I would say.”
Kelvin looked at his watch. Thirty-four minutes.
“We have to take off and get the word out,” he said.
“I don’t think I can just leave that girl with Theodore,” said Vinnie. She looked at Jat, who nodded. “You take the ship up, Kel. We’ll go with Theodore.”
“You sure?” asked Kelvin.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” said Vinnie. “To tell you the truth I was never keen on leaving the planet anyway. I haven’t been off Venus since we were demobbed. I guess the place has grown on me.”
Kelvin didn’t laugh at the old joke.
“Take care, then,” he said, giving her a quick one-armed hug. “I’ll do my best to make sure the Rotarua doesn’t launch anything. I’ll get the rescue story out.”
“Here,” said Jat, handing over a flame pistol, the bigger military version of the heat-beams Kelvin and Vinnie carried. “You never know; Theodore might have missed something.”
Kelvin took the weapon and made as if to hug Jat as well. She ducked under his arm in a lightning move and punched him very lightly on the side of the head, which for Jat was pretty much an extreme show of affection.
Theodore carried the girl out of the air lock, lifting her high as he waded over to the waiting frogsled. Kelvin raised a hand as he passed, but not too close.
“Thanks, Theodore,” he said. “Stay leprous.”
As Kelvin expected, the outer door of the air lock wouldn’t shut under power and he didn’t have time to wrestle with the hydraulic system. The inner door did shut, however, and he closed every hatch behind him as he made his way cautiously to the bridge, flame pistol ready. There were patches of mold all over the place, but nothing that moved, sent out tendrils, blew spores into the air, or otherwise seemed immediately inimical.
The bridge was sealed, which was good and bad. Good because it meant it should be relatively unaffected by anything Venusian and bad because it took Kelvin five minutes of his precious time to circumvent the security lockout using old military override codes that, as he had hoped, were grandfathered into the ship’s operating system.
The bridge was fungus-free. Lights winked here and there, indicating the presence of standby power and dormant systems, another sign that the landing had been much more successful than it deserved to be. Kelvin hurried forward past the rear seats for the nonexistent bridge crew, checked the command pilot’s chair to make sure there wasn’t anything nasty waiting in its highly padded interior, and sat down, his hand sliding easily into the authorization glove. This was the real test.
A holographic screen flickered in the space in front of his eyes.
“Commander Kelvin Kelvin 21, Terran Navy, assuming emergency command in potential disaster situation,” rasped Kelvin. He felt the slight prick of the sampler. The screen flashed amber, then red, then finally the green of acceptance. Other holographic screens blinked into bright existence, the authorization glove slid away and a control stick rose up under his hand.
Kelvin scanned the screens. The layout was familiar enough. There were various small malfunctions, a couple of big ones like the open exterior air lock, but on the whole he thought he could raise ship. The lifting fans in the wings were out of the water, and as the whole craft had been venerified, should work even if they weren’t. The nose was probably dug into the mud a bit, but he could tilt his wings and edge backward and up.
He looked at his watch. Twenty-nine minutes.
Ignoring the holographic interface and its complicated expert system-ruled procedures that would take too long, he twisted open the emergency catches, folding down the direct control panel with its heavy-duty switches and dials. Lights lit up on the panel as he turned the switches. The ship shuddered as the power plant shifted from standby to ready use. The lifting fans began to slowly whir in the wings, telltales indicating that they were a bit bent up but still within the margins of military tolerance. The expert system would have shut them down immediately, of course.
Kelvin flicked an icon on the holograph and it wiped blank, then refreshed to show a panning view of the exterior. There were clouds of vapor coming off the wings, probably just churned up swamp water. He could just make out the frogsled, leaping into the distance, Jat’s big frog its close companion.
Twenty-five minutes.
Kelvin ran over his mental checklist, flicking a few more switches. The lifting fans were slowly gathering speed. He had to push them ahead slowly, carefully watching the telltales, ready to shut down a fan if there was a problem. He could take off on two of the four fans, but not if one of them exploded and destroyed the wing.
What else? He got out of his seat and looked behind it, detaching the case with its emergency vacuum suit. He put it on but didn’t expand the concertina-like soft helmet, setting it on the copilot’s seat. Then he went to look at his watch, realized it was under the suit, and took a valuable thirty seconds to unseal at the wrist and strap the watch on the outside.
Twenty-two minutes.
“Plenty of time,” muttered Kelvin to himself. “I could make a martini. If I had the makings.”
He looked around again, and saw the bright green handle of the antifungal deluge system. Kelvin reached up and turned it to the right, a red-bordered holograph flicking up to offer numerous warnings, the most significant one being that no one could breathe the stuff that would be misted through every possible part of the ship.